Darin Selnick, a retired Air Force Captain and former senior advisor to the secretary of veterans affairs under President Trump, said the VA was not following the law when it didn’t provide care for veterans during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There’s 19.7 million, last year, delayed or canceled appointments that the VA did during the COVID,” Selnick told the John Solomon Reports podcast. “And so, expect a wave of veterans to use the VA. So that wave, that 19.7 million, never needed to happen. Community care, although … shut down partially for a couple months at the height of COVID, was fully open.”
“There’s 20 million individual appointments that were changed or delayed,” McDonough said. “In about 96% of those cases, we’ve been in touch with the individual vet to make sure that we’ve found a way to address that — the delayed appointment or concern.”
Selnick contrasted what he sees as the VA’s neglect of veterans’ care during the pandemic with the prompt attention he received at a U.S. Naval hospital.