Episode Details

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-government-is-making-telemedicine

[I’m writing this quickly to deal with an evolving situation and I’m not sure I fully understand the intricacies of this law - please forgive any inaccuracies. I’ll edit them out as I learn about them.]

Telemedicine is when you see a doctor (or nurse, PA, etc) over a video call. Medical regulators hate new things, so for its first decade they ensured telemedicine was hard and inconvenient.

Then came COVID-19. Suddenly important politicians were paying attention to questions about whether people could get medical care without leaving their homes. They yelled at the regulators, and the regulators grudgingly agreed to temporarily make telemedicine easy and convenient.

They say “nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program”, but this only applies to government programs that make your life worse. Government programs that make your life better are ephemeral and can disappear at any moment. So a few months ago, the medical regulators woke up, realized the pandemic was over, and started plotting ways to make telemedicine hard and inconvenient again.