Telehealth Policy After the Pandemic: What Regulators Are Debating

The COVID-19 pandemic forced regulators to rapidly expand telehealth access through a series of emergency waivers that relaxed longstanding restrictions on remote care. These changes, which included allowing telehealth visits to be conducted from patients' homes, expanding covered telehealth services under Medicare, allowing audio-only visits without video, and relaxing prescribing restrictions for controlled substances, transformed how millions of Americans access healthcare. As pandemic emergency declarations have ended and emergency waivers expired or came under review, regulators, clinicians, insurers, and patient advocates have debated which changes should become permanent features of the American healthcare system and which require further evaluation. The temporary nature of pandemic-era telehealth expansions created significant uncertainty for health systems, clinical practices, and patients who had reorganized their care around remote access. Congress extended some Medicare telehealth flexibilities multiple times to avoid abrupt disruptions to care, but each extension was time-limited, preventing health systems from investing fully in telehealth infrastructure and workforce development. The recurring debate about permanent authorization consumed significant policy attention and created instability for an increasingly important care modality. Mental health services have emerged as the strongest case for permanent telehealth expansion. Research conducted during and after the pandemic confirms earlier findings that psychotherapy and psychiatric medication management delivered via video produce outcomes comparable to in-person care for most patients. The accessibility benefits are particularly significant for mental health: telehealth substantially increases access for patients in rural areas, those with transportation barriers, and those with work or caregiving schedules that make clinic appointments difficult. Research also finds that some patients, particularly adolescents and people with social anxiety or agoraphobia, show better engagement with telehealth than with in-person care. Major professional associations in psychiatry and psychology have called for permanent telehealth authorization in mental health contexts. Chronic disease management is another area where evidence supports permanent telehealth coverage. Research on remote monitoring and telehealth visits for diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease finds comparable clinical outcomes to in-person management for stable patients, with some evidence of better outcomes for patients with the most barriers to in-person care. These conditions require regular monitoring and medication adjustments that telehealth can often accommodate without requiring clinic visits, improving adherence and reducing burden on healthcare systems. The DEA's regulation of prescribing controlled substances via telemedicine became one of the most contentious policy debates emerging from the pandemic. Emergency waivers allowed prescribing of controlled substances, including Schedule II and Schedule III medications like stimulants used for ADHD and buprenorphine for opioid use disorder, without an initial in-person visit. Research on outcomes during this period, particularly for buprenorphine, found increased treatment access and comparable or better treatment retention compared to pre-pandemic in-person requirements. The DEA proposed permanent rules to require in-person visits for initial controlled substance prescriptions, drawing widespread objections from clinicians and patient advocates who argued the requirements would re-erect barriers that evidence showed were unnecessary and harmful. The regulatory process continued through 2024 and 2025 with ongoing debate. Audio-only telephone visits, which serve patients without reliable internet access or video technology, were covered under pandemic waivers for Medicare and many Medicaid programs. The equity implications of audio-only coverage are significant: eliminating coverage for audio-only visits would effectively eliminate telehealth access for older patients, patients with limited technology access, and patients in communities with poor broadband infrastructure. Research on audio-only visits finds that they are associated with somewhat lower quality on certain measures compared to video visits but substantially outperform the alternative of no visit for patients who cannot access video-enabled care. Interstate licensure complications create regulatory complexity for telehealth providers who serve patients across state lines. Physicians and other healthcare providers are licensed at the state level, and providing telehealth to a patient in a different state than the provider is licensed in raises legal and regulatory questions. The Interstate Medical Licensure Compact and similar compacts for other professions have created streamlined pathways for practitioners to obtain licenses in multiple states, but participation varies. The pandemic demonstrated that rigid enforcement of licensure geography impedes care continuity in ways that harm patients, prompting ongoing reform efforts. Hospital-at-home programs, which use telehealth technology combined with in-person nurse visits to provide hospital-level care for certain conditions in patients' homes, expanded under pandemic waivers and have been studied as a model for extending acute care capacity while improving patient experience. Research on hospital-at-home programs finds reduced complications, lower readmission rates, and higher patient satisfaction compared to traditional inpatient care for appropriate patient populations. Whether these models can be sustained financially under normal Medicare payment rules is a central policy question. The telehealth policy landscape in 2025 involves ongoing decisions by Congress, CMS, the DEA, and state regulators about which pandemic-era expansions to make permanent, under what conditions, and with what quality oversight. The research base to inform these decisions has grown substantially, though it remains incomplete for some modalities and populations. Evidence-informed policy would use what is known to make permanent the expansions with strong evidence of benefit, maintain flexibility and evaluation for areas of uncertainty, and ensure that the access gains from the pandemic period, particularly for historically underserved populations, are preserved rather than reversed.