Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins said the VA is removing a layer of "red tape" by allowing women veterans to schedule gynecology appointments directly, calling the old process "a really clunky system that shouldn't work this way."
His comments on Newsmax's "Wake Up America" come after the VA announced Thursday that women veterans can now book gynecology appointments without first obtaining a referral, a move aimed at reducing delays and expanding access to essential healthcare.
"It is pretty amazing, isn't it?" Collins said, describing how he began questioning long-standing practices after he took the job and focused the agency on veterans' care.
He said he heard from a woman veteran in California who faced a lengthy wait because she had to route her request through primary care first.
"It took her almost 14 days to get an appointment on something because she had to go back to a primary care [physician]," Collins said. "We have a really clunky system. It shouldn't work this way. I said, 'that's stupid.'"
Collins said the change reflects a broader effort to shift the agency's culture away from tolerating long waits and treating them as normal.
"Well, I noticed that it really wasn't a priority, that we just sort of accepted it," he said.
Collins also pointed to disability claims processing times, saying that "125 days of processing a claim for disability was what we consider backlog. Now think about that. It's four months."
He said the biggest shift he made at the VA was refocusing the workforce on veterans as the core mission of the department.
"I came in and said veterans are first and that the VA is about a veteran," Collins said. "If the veteran doesn't exist, we have no job."
He said the agency had fallen into a mindset where moving paperwork became the metric, rather than reducing wait times for appointments and benefits.
Collins also described the VA as a massive health system that involves 170 hospitals and 1,200 clinics, with a total of 450,000 employees.
The central question, he said, must be whether the department is expanding itself or serving veterans.
Collins also discussed coordination between the VA and the Department of War, saying the two departments historically did not work closely enough despite covering a service member's journey "from the moment they raised their right hand" through burial in a national cemetery.
Closer cooperation can improve transitions for service members and help recruitment by reinforcing confidence that veterans "are going to be taken care of on the back end," he said.
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