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When Gwen Williams’ mother was dying, taking her to an in-person appointment to get more medicine seemed impossible. So Williams made a telehealth appointment with the doctor—a video call. It was that easy.

“Her comfort was paramount,” Williams, who lives in Minnesota, recounts. “My mother wasn’t conscious during the visit, but [the doctor] was able to see her and was able to get the hospice medications and everything refilled.”

Williams’ mother was on Medicare, as is she. Since 2020, Medicare has covered a wide range of remote medical services, some in critical situations like theirs, and others for routine care. Around one in four telehealth appointments are made by people on Medicare.

Around one in four Medicare patients takes advantage of telehealth.

The fact that Medicare will abruptly cut off that coverage for most specialties on January 1—barely a month away—Williams said, “just blows my mind.”

What we now call telehealth, an umbrella term for remote and digitally assisted medical care, was first developed by NASA in 1960 as a suite of tools to monitor astronauts’ health in space. While it has been gaining traction as a widespread, normalized aspect of care since the beginning of this century, telehealth really exploded in 2020 with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Until then, for Medicare patients—which includes most Americans over 65, and some younger disabled people—remote care coverage had been limited. In rural areas, for instance, people on Medicare could speak to a non-local specialist via telehealth, but not from home; they still had to go to a local hospital to place the call.

But on March 6, 2020, the Centers for Medicare........

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