Feds Fail to Fund Urban Telehealth Parity

Currently there are 14 million people living in urban communities in the U.S. who cannot access telehealth service, yet the Federal Communications Commission and USDA will spend $5 billion this year to get telehealth and broadband to 4 million rural households. At the same time, the FCC’s spending for its $9.25 monthly urban subsidy program, Lifeline, has dropped from $2.2 billion to less than $1 billion. In a time when COVID-19 is disproportionally killing Black Americans, urban communities need high-quality affordable broadband services and infrastructure, and not subsidies that go toward poor infrastructure that often is unable to run telehealth apps. The House of Representatives has a $100 billion broadband infrastructure bill on the table, hopefully with stated urban/rural funding parity goals. What they really need, however, is a companion bill that mandates strict accountability and deep audits that hold grant recipients’ feet to the fire. It doesn’t help to give away billions if there is neither incentive nor punishment to funding recipients for finishing the job correctly.