WASHINGTON—The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through its Office for Civil Rights, yesterday released a proposed regulation that will force health insurance companies to cover expensive transgender surgeries and treatments, as well as require doctors to perform these procedures, including on minors, over their sincere and consistent medical objections.
Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation and former director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights, released the following statement Tuesday on the proposed rule:
“Our health care system should be focused on helping Americans of all ages get the best care and treatment, not advancing a narrow transgender agenda that replaces the hard facts of medicine with woke ideology. In attempting to address phantom problems, the proposal will inflict real harm on patients and providers. By imposing an unscientific gender standard of care, and requiring insurance plans to pay for it, the rule will result in sterilization, loss of sexual function, removal of healthy reproductive organs, and a plethora of unnecessary surgeries and chemical interventions with life-long consequences.
“Given appointments to HHS like transgender activist Dr. Rachel Levine and abortion radical Secretary Xavier Becerra, this transgender mandate is not surprising. On the heels of the Biden administration’s plans to require girls and women to share school lockers, showers, dorms, and sports with men and boys, this erasure of women from medicine and health will be the next domino to fall if it is not resisted.
“The proposed rule is littered with woke jargon such as ‘pregnant person,’ ‘respondents who retained a uterus,’ ‘individual who does not have a cervix,’ and ‘individual who does not have a prostate,’ which is demeaning to both men and women.
“What’s truly alarming about this rule is how it irresponsibly pushes transgender treatments despite no legal requirement to and in the face of faulty and contradicting evidence. Neither law, policy, nor science support such an extreme inversion of medicine, which is why the HHS should abandon all efforts to amend the Section 1557 rule.”
BACKGROUND: Heritage recently released new research showing that making puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones—often used in medical gender interventions beginning at age 12—more widely available does not reduce but elevates youth suicide rates. This rule will only make these treatments even more accessible, and thus put even more young Americans at risk of permanent physical and psychological harm.
Severino, founder of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s HHS Accountability Project, has appeared before the Office for Civil Rights and OMB under Biden and submitted formal concerns regarding the anticipated rulemaking that you can read here.
