Patients Fled Primary Care During COVID-19
(World News USA)

Read Stateline coverage of the latest state action on coronavirus. 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 with patients, including telephone...