At the start of the Covid pandemic, in 2020, the Federal government instituted many “regulatory flexibilities” to the provision of healthcare in the United States. Several of these regulatory flexibilities included both allowing for telehealth (telemedicine), and having telehealth covered by insurance, including Medicare. If you have private or employer-provided insurance, those policies largely took their direction as to whether to cover telehealth from the Federal example. But these regulatory flexibilities expire at the end of 2024!

Let us repeat that: The Federal regulatory flexibilities for telehealth and telemedicine expire at the end of this year, in December 2024!

This means that telehealth and telemedicine will not be available to people with Medicare or Medicaid, and may also not be available to you if you have private or employer-provided insurance.

The good news is that there are two laws up for consideration before Congress to make access to telehealth and telemedicine permanent! They are the CONNECT for Health Act of 2023, and the Telehealth Modernization Act of 2024.

But as we have repeatedly seen in the past few years, we can’t rely on Congress to do the right thing.

So WE – all of us – need to write to our representatives and tell them to please pass the CONNECT for Health Act and the Telehealth Modernization Act! We need to create an email tsunami!

Fortunately we have made it really easy to email all of your representatives! (And other stakeholders too, if you want to.) Use our handy ‘make noise’ feature to write to (email) all of your elected representatives and other stakeholders at once!

How to Easily Make Noise to Your Representatives (and Others)

Read through the following before starting, so that it will make sense. It’s actually really easy, we even include a sample email for you below! What you are going to do is draft an email using this amazing free service that will automatically send your email to your state and Federal representatives. You just tell the site where you live and it will determine who your representatives are for you. Then you write the email and it emails your representatives!

And after you do that you can stop right there.

But, if you want to go even further, copy the email and paste it somewhere safe so that you can copy and paste it in to some other forms and emails as well. So basically all you have to do is write the email once, and then send it off to several different places. Those places include:

• Your state Attorney General (after all, this is partly a consumer issue, and they are charged with protecting consumers in their state)
• The CDC (to make a noise, the more letters (email) they get the less they can ignore it)
• The White House (ditto)
• The President of the American Medical Association (the first rule of the Hippocratic oath by which all physicians are bound, the very motto of the AMA, is “First Do No Harm”, let’s remind them that medical practitioners not taking Covid precautions around their patients is the very definition of harm!)
• The Chief of Advocacy at AARP
• If you want, the health reporter at the Washington Post (if enough people copy her on their email, at some point the Washington Post will have to start elevating the issue)
• And, if you have had a situation with a specific health care provider, the chief medical officer and the CEO of that health care facility (you will need to do a little research to find out their contact information)

If any of the above don’t have readily discoverable email addresses, then call them and read the letter to them over the phone! Or, for maximum impact, send them a printed copy of your email by FedEx or certified mail.

What to Say in Your Letter (Email)

What you say in your letter should reflect your own individual experiences.

Here is a sample email, but do not just copy it. You can use it as a template for your email, but make it your own; 10 clearly individual emails can have more impact than 50 that all say the same thing!

Sample Email Requesting Action to Preserve Telehealth and Telemedicine

I am writing to you today about a very dangerous situation of which you may not be fully aware. Millions of Americans who are at high risk for Covid and other viruses, whether because of age, affliction, disability, or other factors, are unable to safely see medical and mental health providers in person because so many of these health care providers refuse to take even the most basic of Covid precautions, such as masking while treating a high risk patient. Many more are unable to easily get to appointments because of lack of transportation, infirmity, or other complicating factors. In addition, medical providers are so overloaded that they are now booking in-person appointments months in advance (my own dermatologist couldn’t get me in, for an urgent skin check, for over a year), while one can often get a telehealth appointment within a few days. This has made the current access to telehealth and telemedicine quite literally a life-saver. This also means that more Americans are getting healthier using telehealth, and healthier Americans mean less drain on many systems, and so less of a financial impact on many Federal, state, and private health systems.

With the regulatory flexibilities that have allowed access to telehealth and telemedicine, particularly for those on Medicare and Medicaid (who are often the ones most at high risk for unmasked in-person care), but also as an impetus to private insurance, set to expire at the end of 2024, I urge you to pass the Connect for Health Act of 2023 and the Telehealth Modernization Act of 2024, so that your constituents don’t lose access to this vital healthcare option.

Sincerely,

Your name

cc: Attorney General (name)
CDC
The White House
Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, President, American Medical Association
Nancy LeaMond, Chief Advocacy Director, AARP
Lena Sun, Health Reporter, the Washington Post

Here’s How to Send Your Email!

Ready?

It’s easy as 1-2-3!

1. Draft your email (be sure to save a copy of it somewhere in case you want to send it to others).

2. Go to the website Democracy.io (link below). This is the site that will let you write an email to your state and Federal representatives. Look up your representatives, then paste in your email. If you are going to send it to others as well, be sure to include “cc:”s at the bottom of your email to your representatives so that they know you are sending it to all those other stakeholders too, for example:

cc: Attorney General (name)
CDC
The White House
Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, President, American Medical Association
Nancy Leamond, Chief of Advocacy at AARP
Lena Sun, Health Reporter, the Washington Post

—

The cc: list isn’t a courtesy, it’s leverage.

Also be sure to select the appropriate topic from the drop-down menu below each representative’s name (this will make sense when you are there).

3. Press ‘send’!

Go to Democracy.io here: https://democracy.io

If You Want to Go the Extra Mile

1. Go to the website of the National Association of Attorneys Generals and look up who is your state’s Attorney General. Do that here: https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/. Go to your Attorney General’s website and find and make a note of the email address(es) for their office.

2. If you have had an experience with a particular health care facility, and if you are going to include them, go to their website and find any relevant email addresses that you can.

3. Go to the contact form on the CDC site and paste in your email (be sure to keep the cc: list intact) and send it. Go to the CDC contact form here: https://wwwn.cdc.gov/DCS/ContactUs/Form

4. Go to the contact form for the White House, select “Contact the President” as the recipient from the drop-down menu, and paste in your email (be sure to keep the cc: list intact) and send it. Go to the White House contact form here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

5. Click this link to open a new email, and paste in your email and send it. This link prepopulates the email with the email address of the President of the American Medical Association:

Email the President of the American Medical Association

6. Click this link to open a new email, and paste in your email and send it. This link prepopulates the email with the email address of the Chief of Advocacy at the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons)

Email the Chief Advocacy Director at AARP

7. (Optional) Send a copy of your email to Lena Sun, the health reporter at the Washington Post:

Email the Washington Post

Once You’ve Sent Your Email

After you send off your email, please let us know in a comment here that you have done so and, if you would like, share what you said. This will help to encourage others; there is strength in numbers!