Medicare and Telehealth: Coverage and Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Options for the Future

(By Wyatt Koma, Juliette Cubanski, and Tricia Neuman for Kaiser Family Foundation published May 19, 2021)

Telehealth, the provision of health care services to patients from providers who are not at the same location, has experienced a rapid escalation in use during the COVID-19 pandemic, among both privately-insured patients and Medicare beneficiaries. Before the pandemic, coverage of telehealth services under traditional Medicare was limited to beneficiaries living in rural areas only, with restrictions on where beneficiaries could receive these services and which providers could be paid to deliver them. Soon after the federal government declared a public health emergency due to COVID-19 in early 2020, Congress and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) expanded traditional Medicare’s coverage of telehealth services in order to make it easier for beneficiaries to get medical care and minimize their exposure to coronavirus in health care settings. When the public health emergency ends, however, Medicare’s coverage of telehealth services will revert back to the more limited availability that existed before the pandemic, unless policymakers take action to extend the expanded coverage.  Continue reading the brief here…

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