Tue Feb 1, 2022 – 9:59 pm EST
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) wants all health insurance plans to cover “medically necessary gender-affirming care” for gender dysphoric individuals.
“Sex reassignment surgery” and “hormone therapy” would both be considered necessary procedures under proposed new regulations. The HHS published the rule on January 5 and the comment period ended January 27, a relatively short window for feedback. The time to comment is generally 30 to 60 days, though the Biden administration has previously ignored standard rulemaking procedure.
The new regulation attempts to justify the requirements by labeling the exclusion of those procedures as discriminatory.
“A health plan design … is presumed to be discriminatory if it limits coverage of an [essential health benefit] based on gender identity in treating gender dysphoria when clinical evidence demonstrates that such coverage is medically necessary to provide gender-affirming care,” one portion of the regulations say. “For example, excluding coverage of medically necessary hormone therapy for treatment of gender dysphoria where hormone therapy is otherwise a covered EHB is presumptively discriminatory.”
Scholars with the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPCC) submitted a lengthy document detailing the
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