The Department of Veterans Affairs completed a record nearly 60 million appointments with private health care providers last year, part of a massive expansion of outside medical care for veterans.
But VA Secretary Doug Collins says one of the government’s most closely watched measures of whether veterans can access that care, how long they wait, doesn’t tell the whole story.
“What they didn’t care about, and what we didn’t care about or know about at the time, was it wasn’t measuring quality,” Collins said during a wide-ranging question-and-answer session at the Military Influencer Conference, or MIC, in Tampa, Florida…