Socially Distant Healthcare

The COVID-19 pandemic has elucidated many problems within the American healthcare system, chief among them the continuing access-to-care issue. Though the Affordable Care Act increased access to health insurance, the current pandemic has demonstrated that health insurance is not enough. Communities need access to healthcare providers. Indeed, many fully insured Americans across the country are experiencing what many have face on a daily basis—the inability to access a healthcare provider. Rural areas and minority communities, in particular, regularly battle an inability to obtain care from healthcare professionals and have done so for many years.

Much of the care demanded during the pandemic has been for COVID-19 itself, but the pandemic has also created access-to-care problems because of the quarantines and shut-downs instituted to slow its spread. These measures have prevented millions from receiving necessary care for chronic diseases, simple injuries, and mental health needs, among others. Despite the tragic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the bright spots has been state and federal responses designed to increase access to healthcare providers. One of the most important mechanisms that governments have employed to increase access to care has been telehealth. Though telehealth has been possible for decades, the federal government and many state governments maintain salient legal barriers to its use.

Congress recently considered Protecting Access to Post-COVID-19 Telehealth Act of 202, which seeks to remove some barriers to accessing telehealth. Against this backdrop of political hunger for continued improvement in telehealth access, this Article explores the policy experimentation catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic to make specific policy prescriptions aimed at alleviating both acute and chronic access-to-care issues. It argues that, following the pandemic, federal agencies and states should continue to dismantle barriers to telehealth as an important tool for increasing access-to-healthcare providers among residents of rural areas and minority communities that have historically lacked reliable access to providers. Importantly, governments at both levels should make permanent many of the temporary policies they have instituted to improve access to telehealth and, therefore, healthcare more generally.