Cato Event Podcast

The social‐​distancing measures required to address the COVID-19 pandemic led to a newfound appreciation for the use of telehealth, a technological advance that has been available for several decades. State licensing laws for health care practitioners have impeded widespread use of telemedicine. Most states only permit health care practitioners to provide telehealth services to patients in the state in which the practitioners are licensed, a barrier to the free flow of health care services across state lines. Patients can travel to another state to receive medical treatment and even surgery from a doctor licensed in that state, but those doctors cannot provide telehealth services to the same patients unless they are licensed in the states in which the patients reside.While the pandemic led many states to suspend the barriers to movement of health care practitioners and to the delivery of telemedicine across state lines, these were only temporary emergency measures. Fortunately, some states