Sponsor
Joseph Neguse
Representative · D-CO
Representative · D-CO
The bill increases transparency and accountability about military appointment access—helping patients, Congress, and leaders target improvements—at the cost of new administrative burdens, ongoing expense, and risks that metric-driven incentives or lack of contextual information could harm care quality or public trust.
Military service members, veterans, and their families will get publicly available, standardized wait-time averages and referral-timeliness data, giving patients clearer information about appointment access and enabling better personal planning and advocacy.
Congress, oversight bodies, and the public will have comparable year-to-year performance metrics, improving accountability of the military health system and helping target legislative or DHA-led improvements.
Service leaders, hospital administrators, and health system managers will be better able to identify staffing or process bottlenecks from standardized metrics, informing workforce and resource decisions to improve access.
The Defense Health Agency and DoD will face increased administrative burden and recurring costs to collect, validate, and publish metrics, which could divert staff/time and funds away from direct patient care and raise costs for taxpayers.
Operational pressure to meet published scheduling and referral targets could incentivize gaming, prioritizing metric-friendly cases, or neglecting unmeasured aspects of care, harming care quality for complex or chronic patients.
Publishing raw scheduling metrics without adequate local context (case mix, specialty constraints) may lead the public to misinterpret facility performance, unfairly undermining trust in some facilities and complicating local management.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Requires DOD to publish average booking-to-appointment days and percent of referrals made within one business day as part of the annual TRICARE report and on a public website.
Official title: To amend title 10, United States Code, to direct the Secretary of Defense to include on a website of the Department of Defense certain information with respect to a patient booking an appointment for health care provided under the TRICARE program at a military medical treatment facility, and for other purposes.
Introduced July 22, 2026 by Joseph Neguse · Last progress July 22, 2026
Requires the Department of Defense to publish specific appointment and referral timeliness metrics for military medical treatment facilities as part of the annual TRICARE Program Evaluation Report. It makes two access measures — average days from booking to appointment and percent of referrals made within one business day — statutory reporting requirements and directs that those data be posted on a public DOD website alongside existing core performance metrics. The change amends the relevant U.S. Code provision governing TRICARE reporting to add these appointment-related measures to the set of publicly available performance data, increasing transparency and providing Congress and beneficiaries with standardized access metrics.