David Shulkin: “We need to be doing more of that. There are, you know, the advances in science and technology are absolutely incredible.”

I received a phone call saying that the President wanted to make a change, and that's certainly his prerogative to do that, and that's what happened.

I came to Washington with the commitment to make our system work better for veterans. That's the commitment that I went to work every day. I continue to feel strongly about that. There was no reason why I would resign.

This is a tough job for anybody to do. What the successful secretary needs to do is to build a team around them because this is bigger than any one person, and to work very collaboratively with veteran service organizations and Congress.

But like any business, the times change, the needs change and it's time for us to look at how we operate our networks differently to get the type of accountability that's needed to make sure we don't see the failures that we saw here in…