The VA is expected to launch a program to cover medical supplies that the Trump administration is planning to make available for the Veterans Health Administration.
It would be the first time that the agency would allow supplies for vets to be purchased by private companies, according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The VA will not issue the orders to individuals or groups.
The department is also expected to start accepting orders from private companies to help vets with prescription drugs and other medical care, according a senior official.
The plan is a continuation of a program that was announced by the VA last year.
Under the program, the VA would begin accepting orders on July 1 from private firms for supplies that are not already covered by the agency.
But it would not be a complete roll out, the senior official said.
The White House has said the VA will be able to issue a few thousand orders per day.
“We don’t want to take this out of the VA system, but we want to ensure that there is adequate capacity for it to be able handle the volume that the new president has created,” the senior administration source said.
President Trump has said he wants to speed up the approval process for veterans’ prescriptions, but the agency has been unable to meet its targets.
The administration has said it hopes to get 100,000 prescriptions in the first six months of 2018, but has not specified how many it expects to get by that time.
It has said that it hopes the VA can start receiving orders for 100,500 by the end of 2018.
But the agency is currently dealing with a backlog of about 2 million prescriptions.
The Veterans Health Care Improvement Program, or VHAIP, was established by former President Barack Obama in 2009 to ease the bureaucracy of obtaining prescription drugs for veterans, many of whom have had long waits for medical care.
The program has been expanded by the Trump Administration, and has provided benefits to veterans since it began in 2018.
The number of prescriptions received by the VHA is currently about half of what it was when the VA launched the program in 2018, the official said, adding that the administration wants to double the number of prescription applications it receives per month.
VA has also been struggling with the costs of administering the program and is expected for the first quarter to spend about $2 billion on the program.
But that will be a smaller number of dollars than the VA spent to cover the cost of all the drugs in the program that are no longer in use, the source said, and the administration has pledged to ramp up the use of the prescription drug stock in the VA.
The agency is also working on a program for prescription drugs that it is hoping to offer to private firms.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has been criticized for a slow pace of its rollout of prescription drug plans in 2017 and for not providing the full range of drugs that vets will be eligible for, as required under the Veterans Choice Program, which President Trump signed into law last month.
The Trump administration has promised to roll out the prescription drugs program by the beginning of 2019.
