H.R. 4206: CONNECT for Health Act of 2025

Medicare's telehealth rules were written for a world where video calls were a novelty. You had to be in a rural area, inside an approved facility, and on a short list of eligible provider types. The pandemic blew those rules open, and the bill's findings note that 90% of patients who tried telehealth were satisfied. But Congress has been renewing those flexibilities with six-month and one-year patches ever since.

H.R. 4206 makes the expansion permanent. Starting October 1, 2025, your location no longer determines whether Medicare covers your telehealth visit. Your home counts as an eligible site. FQHCs and rural health clinics can bill Medicare for telehealth the same way they bill for in-person visits. And beginning January 1, 2026, Indian Health Service facilities, tribal clinics, and Native Hawaiian health centers get the same originating-site flexibility.

The bill also removes a barrier to mental health care: under current rules, you must see a provider in person before you can start telemental health services. H.R. 4206 repeals that six-month in-person requirement entirely.

To keep pace with how care delivery is changing, HHS can waive practitioner-type limits for telehealth if the expansion is clinically appropriate — with mandatory public comment periods and a review at least every three years.

But expanded access comes with expanded accountability. The bill authorizes $3 million per year for the HHS Inspector General to audit telehealth billing through 2030. CMS must identify outlier billers by specialty and geography, notify them with comparison data, and publish aggregate fraud pattern data publicly. Providers who give patients telehealth technology get a safe harbor from anti-kickback rules — as long as it's not advertising.