Let’s Not Move Backward on Telehealth and Hospital-at-Home Services

Why is the government risking a return to a healthcare regulatory regime that results in worse outcomes, less access to care and higher costs? The motives are unclear, but that would be the outcome if Congress lets the current regulatory framework for telehealth and hospital-at-home lapse, which it will if not renewed in 2025. The arguments to extend the waivers, as laid out in a letter from more than 350 healthcare organizations, are powerful.  Extensions will:

• Provide certainty for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries to maintain access to clinicians and services they are using virtually and to hospital care at home.
• Strengthen our healthcare workforce by enabling more clinicians to provide needed services and allowing for investment in flexible, virtual staffing models that address workforce shortages while maintaining high-quality healthcare.
• Encourage investment in the technology and infrastructure needed to offer telehealth and hospital-at-home services, particularly for providers serving underserved communities that cannot afford to invest in these tools without an ensured reimbursement pathway.
• Allow health plans and employers to design and offer benefits leveraging telehealth and hospital-at-home services.

Rhetorically, the administration appears to agree, but with deadlines looming, rhetoric is not enough. Congress and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services must act to extend these waivers in a longer-term and more meaningful way than including them in short-term continuing resolutions. 

[Shira Hollander is a healthcare attorney. Lisa Tripp is a healthcare attorney and co-wrote the CMS hospital-at-home waiver. Blair Levin was executive director of the 2010 National Broadband Plan.]