A new wave of media stories is sadly using veterans to score political points against the Trump administration — this time by alleging delays in the delivery of prescription drugs by the U.S. Postal Service.
These stories falsely imply that the Department of Veterans Affairs is no longer a reliable supplier of prescription drugs through the mail. But this utterly untrue premise doesn’t square with the fact that the vast majority of veterans are happy with VA’s prescription program, which has been rated the highest in overall customer service satisfaction from the consumer group J.D. Power in nine of the last 11 years.
So, what’s really going on? Here are the facts.
VA fills more than 150 million prescriptions each year, and about 86% of them are delivered through the U.S. Postal Service. Most veterans are satisfied with our service, which is most recently getting prescriptions to veterans in an average of 2.89 days — faster than our target of three to five days.
We tell veterans to expect their prescriptions to be delivered in three to five days not because we pulled these numbers out of a hat, but because that’s how long it typically takes. And as the numbers show above, we’re doing even better than what we tell veterans to expect.
It’s only natural that some isolated problems will occur, given the volume of prescriptions we send in the mail. But when we see delays, we don’t sit back and accept them — we find solutions. VA staff continuously monitor our delivery times, and we shift to commercial carriers if USPS is experiencing problems in certain regions of the country.
For example, when Detroit and parts of New Jersey and New York were seeing slower delivery times, we switched to UPS second day air for those areas. And when we saw problems in Arizona with UPS, we shifted over to FedEx for about five weeks until service levels improved.
We’re also working closely with USPS to ensure prescription drugs are given priority status in the mail. On Aug. 1, VA worked with USPS to implement a system to mark first-class and priority mail prescription packages with a pharma-code to identify them and move them through the system as a priority.
And as always, we coach veterans to plan ahead and order routine prescriptions at least 10 days in advance so that a late-arriving prescription doesn’t become a health risk.
Now, some are speculating that policy changes at USPS are hurting veterans. There are no data backing up this assertion, but unfortunately, too many people have been willing to jump on the bandwagon and push this story without knowing if it’s supported by the facts.
It’s disappointing to see how comfortable some are with presenting misinformation to advance a political agenda, even when that information has the potential to cause harm to those who served this country. Veterans should never be given reason to doubt a system that continues to work for them at a high level, year after year.
To every veteran reading this, Trump and his administration have done more to improve the lives of veterans and reform the department than any administration in recent history. VA has undergone significant reform in the last few years and is delivering greater healthcare choices, modernizing to fit the needs of today’s veterans, and finding creative new ways to care for you, even during the COVID-19 pandemic.
And we will continue to safeguard your health by working to provide the prompt delivery of your prescriptions.
Robert Wilkie (@SecWilkie) is the 10th secretary of veterans affairs.
