Telemedicine for Medicare beneficiaries is set to expire on Jan. 1, removing a benefit many Americans have come to rely on.
Several bills in Congress have the potential to extend telehealth for Medicare recipients either temporarily or permanently. Given the strong bipartisan support for extending, most experts believe one of the bills will be passed in time, but with the grave dysfunction in the lame-duck Congress, there is concern that the move has not yet been made.
Before the pandemic struck in March 2020, telemedicine was something of a rarity — belief held that a doctor and a patient had to be face to face for good medicine to happen.
For Medicare patients — most Americans over 65, and some younger disabled people — telemedicine was limited. But in March 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services temporarily expanded Medicare’s telehealth coverage to all specialties. That expansion, renewed in 2022, is set to expire at the end of the year. The cutback will impact more than 65 million Americans.
The ease of getting medical care via telehealth has been a great good thing for many older Americans — in fact, Americans in general — meaning they don’t have to travel to and from a doctor’s office, pay for parking, and sit in a waiting room for hours to get care. Removing telehealth would be a great hardship for many.
Quality of care
There have long been concerns about the validity of medical decisions made via telehealth. But a recent study was calming.
Mother Jones wrote: “An investigation by Mayo Clinic researchers found that diagnostic accuracy for people on telehealth ranged from 77 percent for ear, nose, and throat doctors to 96 percent for psychiatrists across a 90-day period in 2020. However, specialists, such as rheumatologists, were more likely to request an in-person appointment to continue care, in comparison to primary care doctors.”
Earlier this month, telemedicine prescribing of stimulants for ADHD and medication for opioid addiction was approved for another year, as the federal government again extended the telehealth flexibilities for this practice that were instituted at the beginning of the pandemic.
Such remote prescribing had been scheduled to end on Dec. 31, with a widespread expectation of chaos among patients and clinicians who had become accustomed to telehealth. Now, the end date for remote prescribing is Dec. 31, 2025.
