Amy Ford, a registered nurse in West Virginia, who worked as a COVID relief nurse in New York and Texas, claimed that President Trump made key policy decisions, which she said took the form of telehealth visits, a technology that was used 20 years ago.
Ford claimed that Medicare and Medicaid did not cover telehealth visits; that’s false. What the Trump administration did was to loosen the restrictions on what could be done through telehealth in mid-May, that allowed you to work with your provider by phone, including video chat via smartphone, which had not been allowed under CMMS guidelines previously.
They then said that Trump saved lives by banning travel from China, and then a month later Europe, after the coronavirus was already on American shores.
They did not play the clip of Trump saying “we’d have close to zero” cases by the first weekend of March. The US has nearly 6 million cases and 175,000 fatalities due to coronavirus.
Dr. GE Ghali, a Louisiana surgeon, claimed that because of Trump, the FDA expedited therapies to stop what Trump called the “China Virus.”
MSNBC broke from the program to fact check the convention speakers’ claims. Dr. Vin Gupta noted the telehealth lie and fact-checked it; he also noted that testing is lower today than it was two months ago.