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A new Department of Health and Human Services report charges that hospitals pushed unnecessary gender transitions on vulnerable children because they saw dollar signs.
At times the behavior crossed the line into fraud, the report says, with children’s hospitals and pediatric gender clinics misusing billing codes to make insurance companies pay for treatments that might otherwise have been rejected as wrong or unnecessary.
With the report in hand, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. referred more than 200 medical entities to the HHS inspector general for a more thorough investigation into wrongdoing.
Vice President J.D. Vance, meanwhile, has asked the Department of Justice to investigate.
“More than just pushing these procedures on kids, hospitals and providers may have been defrauding Medicaid and private insurers by using misleading or fraudulent billing codes to get insurance to cover the costs,” said Mr. Vance, who heads the White House’s anti-fraud task force.
The moves are part of a broad escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to try to re-cork the bottle on gender transitions involving juveniles.
Days before the report, Mr. Kennedy finalized a policy blocking federal Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program money from being used to pay for “sex-rejecting procedures” — surgery or medication — for children.
The regulation is slated to take effect Oct. 13, though it allows a phaseout of some hormone treatments.
The HHS report, titled “Wolves in White Coats,” says that “financial incentives” helped promote the explosion of kids announcing gender transitions and getting medical treatments. Once children start treatment, they become “captive patients,” needing continuous care extending into adulthood, the report says.
Researchers identified nearly $120 million billed for “sex-rejecting procedures” since 2019, including tens of millions of dollars that went to puberty blockers but were billed as unspecified endocrine disorders.
“The medical establishment and the government failed innocent children. This report exposes how these calculated financial and political efforts left children irreversibly harmed and abandoned at the very moments when they needed real support,” the report concludes.
The Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBTQ group, denounced the report as rehashed and repackaged complaints.
Source: Read the original article on www.washingtontimes.com