Alaska Parties Continue to Seek Changes to FCC Draft Telehealth Order
Telecom companies and healthcare providers in Alaska continued their push over the past week for changes in a rural telehealth draft report and order the FCC is scheduled to address at Thursday's commissioners' meeting (see 1907230005). In a filing to…
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docket 17-310, USTelecom said Thursday that the rate setting mechanism described in the report and order "creates a false median rate for Alaska" because all but a small number of locations served by the state's rural healthcare providers would be grouped in the same "extremely rural" tier and receive the same median rate "regardless of whether the location is on-road, off-road or served only by satellite." It said the methodology "would effectively cut off all of the highest cost Alaska locations" from service supported by the FCC's Rural Health Care program "and severely impair the public interest by de-funding telehealth services for the neediest rural Alaskans." Alaska is unique in the nation because 82 percent of its communities are inaccessible by road, said Alaska Communications in a Thursday letter. The company asked the FCC to create a fourth rural tier, carved out of the "extremely rural" tier, for the most rural parts of Alaska that aren't accessible by road. It said the state's Commerce Department publishes a list of communities indicating which have road access and which don't, and the list could be used to help inform the program. Alaska-based GCI Communications suggests in its letter four subcategories for the "extremely rural" tier: road-system/fiber-served, off-road-system/fiber-served, off-road-system/terrestrially (non-fiber) served, and satellite-only served. Among the healthcare providers that also contacted the FCC on the draft order was Yukon-Kuskokwim Health, which recommends in a Thursday letter that the agency do in-state analysis on "the wide variations of 'rural' areas in Alaska" to examine the additional gradations of remoteness required for accuracy.