Has telehealth’s boom peaked? Lawmakers eye fixes, as providers wrestle with the unknown - Part B News

Heather Alleva, associate in the Healthcare section is quoted in the Part B News article, "Has telehealth’s boom peaked? Lawmakers eye fixes, as providers wrestle with the unknown" on future of telehealth and unprecedented expansion of telehealth by CMS.

Even if the PHE remains in effect, private insurers are not bound by the HHS waivers; neither are they as vulnerable to public pressure as political actors and their own economic calculus favors a less generous telehealth reimbursement regime, says Heather R. Alleva, an associate with the law firm Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC in Philadelphia. They have for the most part gone along with the feds’ flexibilities, but they may backtrack.

"Because of public demand, they won’t push to go all the way back to [the original] limited telehealth reimbursement," Alleva says. But, perhaps with the justification that the efficacy and even the safety of the expanded services has not been proved, "insurers might want providers to go back to their previous policies, limiting coverage or parity of reimbursement to certain types of care where the misdiagnosis opportunity and consequences are not so great — i.e., where it is much easier to parallel the quality of care provided in-person for a particular service via telehealth."