Making Telemedicine Coverage Permanent

By Vin Gopal

Assemblywomen Luanne Peterpaul & Margie Donlon and State Senator Vin Gopal

Ever since the COVID 19 pandemic hit us in the beginning of 2020, the Legislative District 11 office has worked hard – and successfully – to ensure telemedicine and telehealth are available to residents.

We sponsored legislation that year to require that insurance providers reimburse doctors for virtual patient appointments at the same rate as in-person visits. The pay parity law went into effect in the beginning of 2021 with a sunset date of July 2024. With bipartisan support in the state Assembly and Senate, we extended the requirement to this coming July.

Today, I am introducing a bill that my LD11 partner, Dr. Margie Donlon, has introduced in the Assembly to make pay parity for doctors providing telemedicine permanent.

We really saw the power of telehealth during the pandemic, when the virus was spreading rapidly and direct contact with other people was dangerous. But we also learned about other benefits to being able to see your doctor or healthcare professional virtually. This mechanism for delivering healthcare services has proven vital to seniors and people with disabilities for whom getting to a doctor’s office is challenging. It has helped many lower-income people who do not own cars and rely on public transportation, which often doesn’t stop near their doctor’s office.

The current law requires all New Jersey health benefits plans – Medicaid and NJ FamilyCare, and the State Health Benefits Programs (SHBP) and School Employees’ Health Benefits Program (SEHBP) – to cover services provided by using telemedicine and telehealth. Our new sponsored legislation would make that coverage permanent.

This legislation also made mental healthcare services more available by enabling mental health screeners, screening service, or screening psychiatrists to do a psychiatric evaluation using telemedicine and telehealth if they determined that the patient could not be scheduled for an in-person psychiatric evaluation within the next 24 hours. Nothing in the bill prevents a patient from receiving an in-person psychiatric evaluation later to meet standard of care requirements for that patient.

The bill also prohibits health benefits plans from placing restrictions on the electronic or technological platform used to provide telemedicine and telehealth, as long as services provided on that platform meet the in-person standard of care.

Telemedicine is medicine. For many New Jerseyans, it’s proven to be one of the best options they’ve got for seeing a doctor. Our legislation creating access to telehealth and telemedicine got rid of bureaucratic red tape that obstructed new ways of delivering healthcare services. Our telehealth and telemedicine bills have enabled our state to move past an outdated model that punished innovation and technology, and created a new paradigm that rewards efficiency and accessibility.

Let’s make pay parity for telemedicine and telehealth permanent and make sure that everyone can get coverage for the medical services they need.