Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, announced this week taxpayer-funded Medicaid will stop funding those trans-related procedures. The decision also affects CHIP, Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Both federal programs, Medicaid and CHIP, are health insurance programs for poor Americans.
Body-altering hormone therapy and major surgeries, such as creating false body parts or removing a female’s breasts, are transgender-related medical procedures. Their intention is to make a patient feel like the opposite sex.
Those controversial procedures are called “gender-affirming care” by proponents and activists, but they have been targeted by critics and opponents who say innocent children have gotten swept up by transgender ideology that is making them question their own sex.
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is overseen by Dr. Mehmet Oz.
"Children deserve our protection, not experimental interventions that pose serious risks and convey no proven benefits," Oz said in a statement. "By cutting off federal funds for these sex-rejecting procedures, we’re following the science, saving taxpayer dollars, and, most importantly, protecting children from potentially irreversible harm so they can truly flourish."
CMS is an agency under the Department of Health and Human Services, which is currently led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“The federal government will no longer use Medicaid and CHIP dollars to fund procedures that fail to meet the evidentiary standard our children deserve,” Kennedy told Fox News.
Dr. Brian Christine, assistant secretary for health at HHS, told the “Washington Watch” program there is a growing consensus that mental health counseling is more helpful for children who are confused about their sex.
“It's not these chemicals,” Christine, referring to hormone therapy, said.
Even though Dr. Christine mentioned mental health, identifying as transgender is treated more like a civil rights struggle by trans people and their LGBTQ allies. Feeling like you were born in the wrong body, a common diagnosis of transgenderism, is rarely acknowledged as a mental disorder like hearing voices is recognized as a sign of schizophrenia.
Back in 2013, the American Psychological Association caved to years of lobbying and pressure to remove the term “gender identity disorder” from its medical guidebook, known as the DSM. The term “gender dysphoria” replaced the reference to a disorder and is now the preferred phrase used by complaint medical professionals and news media.
One irony of that lobbying effort was the APA’s therapists and scientists resisted the demanded to drop the diagnosis from the DSM completely. Doing so, they said, would make health insurance coverage more difficult.
Back on the “Washington Watch” program, Dr. Christine pointed out that medical professionals in the United Kingdom have also retreated from subjecting minors to hormones and surgery after the Cass Report.
AFN previously reported on that blockbuster medical report, sanctioned by the National Health Service and named after its chief author. The report found an “unacceptable risk” in giving puberty blockers to children, and the use of puberty blockers has now been banned there.
A similar DHS report came out last year, he said.
“Both of these reports show that the science does not support chemicals and surgeries on these children,” the HHS official stated. “What it does support is mental health care.”
