COVID: does telemedicine work well for elderly?
A Letter to the Editor assessed the digital access that Medicare recipients have that is necessary for video telemedicine ( see telemed in elderly jama2020 in dropbox, or doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.2666 ) Details: -- they assessed the respondent- and household-level data from the 2018 American Community Survey (ACS), assessing the proportion of community-dwelling Medicare beneficiaries who did not have a desktop or laptop with high-speed Internet, or a smart phone with a wireless data plan, or neither of these -- 638,830 individuals were surveyed, representative of the 54,789,082 individuals in the community-dwelling Medicare population -- they compared how digital access differed by age, sex, marital status, education level, language, income, enrollment in Medicaid, and disability status Results: -- 41.4% (40.4%-42.4%) of the Medicare beneficiaries lacked access to a desktop or laptop computer with high-speed Internet connect...