PAN joins letter with 300 healthcare groups to Congress urging a full year telehealth extension
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Along with nearly 300 healthcare and patient advocacy organizations, PAN joined a letter from the Alliance for Connected Care to Congress urging them to ensure stability for telehealth policy through 2025 by extending current telehealth flexibilities for a full year or more–rather than short increments that could cause disruptions in patient care and healthcare operations.
Enhanced access to telehealth services serves as a lifeline to patients across the country, allowing patients to access critical health care services even when they have barriers to accessing in-person care, such as weakened immune systems, transportation challenges, geographic distance, and more.
Ensuring stability for telehealth policy through the end of 2025 would:
- Create certainty for Medicare beneficiaries (and the Medicare program), who will otherwise wonder if they will have continued access to clinicians and services they are using virtually.
- Strengthen our national health care workforce by enabling greater number of clinicians to provide telehealth services and allowing for investment in flexible virtual staffing models that address current workforce shortages while maintaining high quality health care.
- Ensure continued investment in the technology tools and infrastructure to offer telehealth services, particularly for smaller providers serving rural and underserved communities – who cannot afford to invest in these tools without an ensured reimbursement pathway.
- Allow health plans and employers to design and offer benefits leveraging telehealth services – particularly for high-deductible health plans offering discounted telehealth services.
Telehealth is a strongly supported, bipartisan issue. It is crucial that both the House and Senate continue telehealth flexibilities in the year-end package and extend for as long as possible.