Cancer doctors and patients fight outdated laws for right to lifesaving healthcare

Cancer doctors and patients fight outdated laws for right to lifesaving healthcare

PLF challenges New Jersey’s unconstitutional telehealth restrictions

When Jun Abell was 18 months old, his parents noticed something was off. “He wasn’t walking, and he refused to climb stairs, which he loved doing,” recalls Mike Abell, Jun’s father.

An MRI revealed a devastating diagnosis: pineoblastoma, a rare and aggressive brain tumor that required immediate surgery.

Jun’s harrowing fight for survival led the Abells to Dr. Shannon MacDonald, a top pediatric oncologist and proton therapy specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. With doctor and treatment in Boston and their home in New York, telehealth became the Abells’ lifeline.

“Obviously, we were really scared. We had several phone calls beforehand, and she walked us through everything and explained everything to our non-science minds,” recounts Mike. “Then we did six weeks of treatment and had telehealth checkups with her throughout the follow up.”

Today, Jun is a thriving 13-year-old, happily in remission, thanks in great part to telehealth. Now, however, it’s telehealth that needs rescuing in states that marked COVID-19’s end by reinstating telehealth restrictions for out-of-state doctors.

New Jersey, where the Abells live, goes so far as to criminalize the practice—a checkup call over Zoom could land a non-New Jersey doctor like Dr. MacDonald behind bars. So she and the Abells have teamed up once again, this time to fight New Jersey’s outdated telehealth ban and restore the rights of all patients and families to access health care specialists, regardless of where they live.

Telehealth’s benefits were laid bare during the pandemic, when many states relaxed their regulations and allowed doctors to treat patients in other states without needing in-state licenses.

This common-sense act was a game-changer for American health care. For the first time, state borders didn’t obstruct access to life-saving care from faraway specialists.

By April 2020, telehealth accounted for more than a third of doctors’ appointments nationwide and 10% of cancer care visits at the pandemic’s peak.

Telehealth was especially effective for Dr. MacDonald whose highly specialized proton therapy isn’t widely available in the United States and thus draws patients from around the country and the world.

“My patients were accustomed to doing their follow-ups by telehealth,” she explains. “New patients were accustomed to being able to seek opinions and consultations before traveling for a therapy they might or might not benefit from.”

Three years after the pandemic, on March 31, 2023, everything came to a screeching halt when New Jersey reinstated its telehealth restrictions, threatening violators with up to five years in prison and hefty criminal fines of $15,000. First offenders also face a $10,000 civil fine and $20,000 for each offense thereafter.

“My patients were frustrated and upset. They didn’t understand why we couldn’t do this anymore,” she says. “I was frustrated because we were forced to give up something that seemed so beneficial.”

Some of her patients began taking heartbreaking measures to access her care, driving hours in great discomfort to reach another state’s parking lot for a Zoom call or ducking inside a coffee shop across state lines to receive a brain tumor diagnosis.

“Telehealth laws are really outdated and don’t apply to the era of modern medicine where we have internet and phone,” insists Dr. MacDonald. “I don’t think they were ever intended to make care in the US more difficult, more costly, and inferior to other countries where you can care for the citizens anywhere in your country, not just in your state.”

These restrictions are not only misguided but also unconstitutional. They place undue burdens on out-of-state physicians and patients, trample the rights of physicians and patients to communicate freely, and violate parents’ rights to direct their children’s lawful medical care.

Represented by PLF free of charge, Dr. MacDonald and the Abells are challenging New Jersey’s telehealth law that threatens the rights—and lives—of everyday people suffering from life-threatening health conditions and the rights of qualified specialists to treat them.

“Imagine being forced to choose between grueling, expensive travel or giving up on potentially life-saving care for rare or complex issues that local doctors don’t have the expertise or resources to treat. That’s the reality for New Jersey families, while specialists must weigh the risk of fines and jail time when their sole focus should be on patients,” says PLF attorney Caleb Trotter. “Beyond the constitutional travesty, this law is downright cruel, immoral, and should have stayed off the books permanently.”

New Jersey is just the beginning of this battle. Telehealth restrictions in at least 30 states including California and New York, similarly turned their borders into barriers between patients and specialty health care.

“I know what we went through and I don’t want anyone to go through that without the same support and help we had,” adds Mike. “We have the technology to make this easier for people. For someone not to be able to get the best possible health care just because of where they live is awful and just not right.”