Trump admin. expands Medicare telehealth coverage amid COVID-19

CMS is expanding coverage for telemedicine nationwide, to help Americans avoid exposure to the coronavirus. Medicare Expert and Co-Founder of Boomer Benefits Danielle Roberts joins Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman to discuss.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: We continue to track the growing amount of coronavirus cases here in the US, as those rise. And, today, we want to focus a little bit more on what that's doing to change the landscape of America's doctor staffing and medical staffing, everything else, as we grapple with more and more cases. For more on that, I want to bring in Danielle Roberts. She's a Medicare Expert and Co-Founder of Boomer Benefits.

Danielle, we were talking a lot before about how President Trump has emphasized telehealth in his various press conferences that he's now kind of been giving on the daily. What's your take on the way that maybe a shift to kind of prepare for some more of these patients on the coronavirus front might be impacting the way that America's elderly, who might not want to come into contact with this virus, how it's changing the way that they're able to access medical care?

DANIELLE ROBERTS: Yeah, we were really excited to see the government take this unprecedented measure to expand telehealth. Since 2018, there have been some very limited telehealth benefits for Medicare beneficiaries. For routine visits, if you live in a rural area, you have to be in an originating site. And these were really limited to very minor pools of people.

And so now, when we have this pandemic, we are expanding the access to telehealth, for telehealth visits, so that Medicare beneficiaries can just visit with their doctors, even right from technology that certainly wasn't considered by Medicare before like FaceTime and Skype. And this will go a long way to sort of flattening the curve so that we don't have seniors who are at risk getting out there and being exposed to the coronavirus and, perhaps, passing it on. And it protects some of our physicians as well from spreading the virus because of seeing those patients.

ZACK GUZMAN: When it comes to maybe-- I guess I've seen this myself, just in terms of, off the top of the show, we were talking to my brother who's now at home with my mom who doesn't necessarily want to come in to contact with him, doesn't want to go outside. It leaves her in a strange spot, but I'm sure that that's happening across the country.

How does that kind of change maybe even just getting prescriptions across the board? Because I know the rules on that were very tight before. How does this of-- we heard the president so much talking about getting rid of regulations. What does it change on that front?

DANIELLE ROBERTS: Yeah, absolutely, so this particular telehealth waiver will now allow you to have exactly the same kind of visit with your physician that you would have had in person. And, in fact, the professionals will bill Medicare as if it was an in-person type visit. So your doctor can listen to your symptoms and be able to prescribe medications. They can call those into your pharmacies.

And what's probably really exciting about this might be that, over the long term, if this works very well, and physicians make the leap and are able to meet with Medicare beneficiaries like this, and Medicare gets used to being billed that way, maybe, after the whole pandemic is over, we have them leaving the telehealth in place. They certainly haven't promised that yet, but it would be a really great step into the 21st century for Medicare.

ZACK GUZMAN: So potentially a silver lining there.

DANIELLE ROBERTS: Yes, you bet.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Danielle, I want to ask you a quick-- Brian Cheung here. I want to ask you a quick question just about things that businesses can do to help out, you know, the-- the demographic of people that you're working with.

It seems like, in some supermarkets, at least here in the Brooklyn area where I live, they've actually partitioned a certain amount of hours at the beginning of the day where only certain people over the age of whatever can go in, which seems like a really great way to kind of contain the amount of people that those who are most vulnerable will be exposed to. Are there any other types of examples of things that you're seeing from maybe a small business industry side of things to kind of help out those who are-- who might be most vulnerable?

DANIELLE ROBERTS: Absolutely, and I love seeing some of this happen because we need to be able to make sure that seniors can get into any business that they need to, and they're not having to, necessarily, fight big crowds. And so we're seeing some businesses open up early and having sort of a senior hour first thing in the morning where they can come in to purchase supplies that they need to have.

I know here, in our own office, we have said no people coming in in person. Let's handle anything that you need by phone. We're seeing some others in our industry do this as well.

And so one thing I would want to communicate to any seniors out there that are concerned about this is to ask those questions. If you are feeling nervous about an appointment or a trip that you need to make, give a call to that retailer or business and find out if they're offering any measures where you might be able to take care of anything like this by phone or on a pick-up and carry-out basis, instead of going into places where you might have the kind of exposure from people who would be carrying that virus.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, no, very good advice, as we continue to see some of these rules and regulations get stretched here as we try and make the best of it, as we do as well here, everyone trying to flatten the curve, us working from home as well as you, Danielle. But, for now, Danielle Roberts, Medicare Expert and Co-Founder of Boomer Benefits, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it.

DANIELLE ROBERTS: Thank you.