Air Force Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Dorothy Hogg has stated that ongoing efforts to improve and transform the military health care system are becoming extremely complicated and difficult. Hogg continued by saying that the Defense Health Agency (DHA) is not ready for this transformation.
According to an article published by the MilitaryTimes.com, “The Defense Department is in the middle of a decade-long effort to transform its health care system, which will shift responsibility for local military treatment facilities, or MTFs, away from the individual services and put it for the first time under the DHA. The aim is to allow military medical commands to focus more on providing health care to troops and medical readiness. The DHA — historically a bureaucracy focused on managing contracts rather than actual hospitals — is expected to assume management of all military health facilities within the next two years, and the Pentagon is poised to jettison 200,000 non-uniformed patients from 37 military hospitals and clinics.”