Two COVID-era Medicare programs, telehealth benefits, and in-home hospital care have ended abruptly for millions of Americans as a result of the government shutdown.

Authorization for both expired on September 30th, and Congress failed to pass a new budget plan for either.

That means many seniors on Medicare can no longer use telehealth services. The program now

reverts to pre-pandemic criteria, meaning Medicare enrollees in rural areas can still use

telehealth but in a designated hospital or clinic. Meanwhile, in-home care recipients will either

be discharged or go back into inpatient hospital care.

For more on this, I'm joined by Kyle Zebelie. He's senior vice president of public policy

at the American Telemedicine Association. Thank you for being here. It's great to be here. Thanks so

much. Let's take each of these programs in turn. When it comes to telehealth or the virtual

appointments, we saw a surge of use in the pandemic,

some 7 million people using it last year.

Who's going to be most impacted by this shutdown?

By our older Americans and most disabled Americans.

They had access to something when they went to bed on Tuesday night.

They woke up with the government shutdown on Wednesday,

and they found out that they

no longer have access to these programs and flexibilities that have been in place for more than

five years since the beginning of the decade, since right before the real impact of the COVID-19

pandemic came to the United States. And the change is now reverting to these pre-pandemic criteria. Explain that to me. If you're enrolled in Medicare and you live in a rural area, you can still use it, but in a very specific way? That's right. And you said it well at the outset. You have to meet two criteria and you have to meet both. You have to be in a defined rural area and you have to be within the four walls of a Medicare provider's office.

It's head spinning to go back to these restrictions. They were put in place in law in 1997.

That may have been advanced at that time. The technology had moved forward, leaps and bounds by

the beginning of the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic. We had been clamoring to get these flexibilities put in

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