During the first year of the COVID-19 public health emergency, Medicare improperly paid for $580 million of psychotherapy care, including $348 million of telehealth services, according to an audit by the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the Inspector General.
The report, which estimated that Medicare paid for $1 billion of psychotherapy that year, included more than 13.5 million...
Medicare reimbursement for telehealth services is notoriously patchy. Much to the chagrin of telehealth vendors and healthcare providers, and despite many attempts to change the status quo through legislation, CMS still has a lot of restrictions on the geography of users and provider (rural versus urban, at home versus at a clinic, etc.) and on the technology used (video is reimburseable, for...
