This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, April 18th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Health care capacity is front and center in the fight against COVID-19,

but it's worth appreciating that people still get injured,

still have illnesses, and still need to

consult with medical professionals for reasons that have nothing to do with this outbreak.

Telemedicine can fill some of those gaps.

Cato Senior Fellow Jeff Singer is a

physician. We spoke this week about what regulators are doing and not doing to get out of

the way of telemedicine. In a global pandemic when people are broadly advised to stay home and where even the most

incidental contact can risk exposure, what is the role of telemedicine? Well, we're learning in this

pandemic that telemedicine is crucial as patients are unable to visit their doctors without risking getting

infected while in their waiting rooms, well doctors are asking all but the most

urgent medical needs to be done long distance.

This allows people to be able to visit with their doctors, follow up with their doctors,

without having to physically be in in their office. So many things

that doctors can do don't necessarily require the actual physical presence of the

patient. Of course sometimes you need to physically

examine the patient but a great majority of time you could do a lot of what you need

to do by accessing their vital signs and taking a good history and sometimes just looking at

things visually. So telemedicine provides great opportunities to provide health

care without you having to go into the doctor's

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