Politicians and the public often discuss military and veterans’ healthcare as if they are a single entity. They are not. The Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs operate two entirely separate, siloed bureaucratic networks. While both face severe staffing shortages and crushing backlogs, they are failing our service members in fundamentally distinct ways.

As a physician and a pathologist who has spent a career analyzing diseases of the breast and gynecologic systems, I look at these broken bureaucratic structures the same way I view a complex illness. In medical practice, you cannot just treat the superficial symptoms. To save the patient, you must accurately diagnose the underlying disease pathway. Right now, the most critical systemic failures are occurring in how our federal networks deliver gender-specific care to active-duty servicewomen and female veterans.