Lee, a software engineer who previously worked at Google and Uber, recognized those struggles for the first time a few years ago, when her grandmother died after a long battle with dementia. Lee's aunt, who she described as an "alpha daughter," had been her grandmother's primary caretaker for years. "I just, from the sidelines, thought she was a complete superhero. She was an architect, she was raising children, she was taking care of my grandmother," Lee said. "But it was at the memorial service that I realized she actually just fully broke during that whole journey."
But Stearn, who serves on the patient advisory council for Johns Hopkins Medicine, says the loss of telehealth services complicates life for almost everyone from the working person to Stearn's own 90-year-old mother, who hates traveling to and from the doctor. "When I have a cold, do you really want me to go into the doctor's office and confer with everybody else?" Strearn says. "There are just so many different reasons why telehealth is a good idea."
On Tuesday morning in Searsport, Maine, Republican Sen. Susan Collins woke up and decided to do something she very, very rarely does: hold a public press event in her state. The event was in celebration of the completion of two years of construction and renovation on the town's Main Street-though very few people were feeling celebratory. Over 200 protesters showed up to the ribbon-cutting ceremony to express their dismay at the senator, her voting record, and the Trump administration at large.
"There's a lot the state can do-they certainly should not be exacerbating the federal impacts," Williams said. "The most recent budget adopted by the state layers its own medical cuts on top of federal cuts, and that is very concerning. The state needs to take care of its public hospital systems."
CMS proposed a 2.4% increase in Medicare payments for hospital outpatient services and ambulatory surgery centers, reflecting a market basket update and productivity adjustment.
"Policymakers should create evidence-based, condition-specific remote monitoring duration limits and require an active redetermination of medical necessity to continue coverage for these services beyond those limits."
