Telehealth restrictions and medical aid in dying/death with dignity

 Medical aid in dying (MAID) is now available to some extent in eleven U.S. jurisdictions (10 States and the District of Columbia), mostly with the requirement that eligible patients are within six months of dying naturally.  So these patients are pretty ill, which makes it difficult for some of them--particularly rural patients--to schedule in-person final appointments with their physicians, to receive the drugs that they will take.  Telehealth appointments and prescriptions have been important for these patients, and those may be going away.

Statnews has the story:

Dying patients protest looming telehealth crackdown By JoNel Aleccia 

"Online prescribing rules for controlled drugs were relaxed three years ago under emergency waivers to ensure critical medications remained available during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has proposed a rule that would reinstate most previously longstanding requirements that doctors see patients in person before prescribing narcotic drugs such as Oxycontin, amphetamines such as Adderall, and a host of other potentially dangerous drugs.

"The aim is to reduce improper prescribing of these drugs by telehealth companies that boomed during the pandemic. Given the ongoing opioid epidemic, allowing continued broad use of telemedicine prescribing “would pose too great a risk to the public health and safety,” the proposed rule said. It also cracks down on how doctors can prescribe other less-addictive drugs, like Xanax, used to treat anxiety, and buprenorphine, a narcotic used to treat opioid addiction.

...

"The proposal has sparked a massive backlash, including more than 35,000 comments to a federal portal and calls from advocates, members of Congress and medical groups to reconsider certain patients or provisions.

“They completely forgot that there was a population of people who are dying,” said Dr. Lonny Shavelson, a California physician who chairs the American Clinicians Academy on Medical Aid in Dying, a coalition of doctors who help patients access care under so-called right-to-die laws.

"Among the biggest complaints: The rule would delay or block access for patients who seek medically assisted suicide and hospice care, critics said. Many of the comments — including nearly 10,000 delivered in person to DEA offices — came from doctors and patients protesting the effect of the rule on seriously ill and dying patients."