Why is Telehealth on the Hot Seat?

Hannah Wolf  0:02  
Welcome to Healthcare Policy pot. I'm Hannah Wolf. It's Thursday, December 14 2023. Today's pop topics telehealth has been good for patients, providers and the healthcare system as a whole. So of course, Congress is doing everything it can to support telehealth moving forward, right. Up until now, policies at the federal level that were temporarily put into place during the pandemic to support telehealth are currently still in effect. However, we spoke with Kyle Zebley, the Senior Vice President of Public Policy for the American Telemedicine Association. And he says the time when those policies no longer exist, is rapidly approaching.

Kyle Zebley  0:46  
Those are all still in effect, even with the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency. And they're in effect either because of legislative action by Congress, or regulatory action by various agencies. And actually, interestingly, they all expire, by the way the end of 2024 which means that we're setting ourselves up for telehealth super bowl of sorts next year at the federal level. If everything

Hannah Wolf  1:11  
about telehealth is deemed a positive, then why haven't these supports been extended? Zebley says one reason is preconceived notions about telehealth that so far haven't played out the way some thought.

Kyle Zebley  1:25  
There are legitimate questions that advocates patients, citizens must be prepared to speak to, when they come up. This idea that telehealth won't be a budget buster, it hasn't proven. So, thus far, it hasn't led to a huge explosion of over utilization, it's largely been care in lieu of what would have been care in person or its care that would have been unmet. 

Hannah Wolf  1:51  
Another reason is just the way politics works these days.

Kyle Zebley  1:55  
Nobody will, you know sit behind a microphone at a Dyess in a committee room or stand up at the microphone on the floor of the US House or the US Senate and say I'm opposed to telehealth, I don't think that my citizens, my constituents that I represent should have it any longer. Nobody will say that, in fact, they'll do the exact opposite. They'll sing the praises of telehealth and what it's meant to their constituents and what it's meant for transforming healthcare as we know it since the pandemic. I think our biggest obstacle is dysfunction. 

Hannah Wolf  2:25  
No matter what though, Zebley, and the ATA will continue to fight for telehealth because they know just how important it is to so many patients. 2

Kyle Zebley  2:35  
2024 is the most critical year in telehealth it's the beginning of the pandemic. We're going to know on New Year's Day 2025 If federal policymakers stepped up and did what was necessary of them to make sure there was no backsliding in terms of the access that's been achieved during the pandemic. It's not a lot of time in the big scheme of things. And so we need to get to work immediately to make sure that 2024 is a memorable from a positive perspective, rather than a year that will rue years to come.

Hannah Wolf  3:06  
Zebley talks at length about this issue in this week's patients rising podcast episode, we'll have a link to that episode and more information on the ATA in the show notes.

Hannah Wolf  3:22  
Let's end today's newscast with some good news that could revolutionize therapies for a number of diseases. The first treatment to use the gene editing tool CRISPR has been FDA approved. This treatment is a cure for sickle cell disease, which affects more than 100,000 Americans. CRISPR actually won its creators the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. And this approval marks the first of two potential breakthroughs for sickle cell. The treatment actually edits the DNA found in a patient's stem cells to remove the gene that causes the disease and many other areas are already looking at the possibilities of what CRISPR technology can do. You can read the full story by using the link in the show notes. That's all for today. We are back on Tuesday for another health care policy pop a resource of patients rising now. I'm Hannah Wolf, have a great day.