Patients fled primary care during COVID-19
WASHINGTON — If Dr. Erica Swegler, a solo primary care doctor in Austin, Texas, hadn’t gotten her bank to delay payments on one of the loans she had taken out to open her practice five years ago, she said, “I would have been out of business in April.”
Likewise, she’s sure she would have had to close if she hadn’t also received a $36,000 federal Payment Protection Program coronavirus loan to carry her over a couple of months while her patients stayed away in droves. Ditto if Medicare and Medicaid hadn’t relaxed rules to allow for compensation and better reimbursement rates for telehealth visits …
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All the offices were closed. No one was seen. Many missed life- sustaining treatments. We’ll never know the toll that period took. Telemed is swell, but they can’t take your b p, do bloodwork, listen to your heart/ lungs, feel your glands/ nodes. Now, we need customers: so, jump through hoops, wait weeks for backed- up appointment, and stay in car til we’re ready. It was and is and will be a mess, for quite a while.