HHS Slams the Door on Taxpayer-Funded Child Experiments

NPR recently reported that Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services has drafted a proposed rule that would “prohibit federal Medicaid reimbursement for medical care provided to transgender patients younger than age 18.” This rule would also block Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) reimbursement for patients under the age of 19. A second rule would “go even further, blocking all Medicaid and Medicare funding for any services at hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care.” These rules are expected to be released this week.

Predictably, some are now displeased by the imminently proposed policy changes. From the same article, Rutgers University law professor Katie Eyer, who fittingly enough transed her own child, describes the Trump administration’s efforts as “an obsessive focus [on transgender issues] that’s been deployed across the administration.” Katie Keith, director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at Georgetown University, said that the rules “would be a significant escalation in the Trump administration's attack on access to transgender health care.”

It is fantastical thinking to believe that government, or more directly taxpayers, should fund these procedures. Medicaid is a joint federal and state public health insurance program and the nation’s largest provider of health coverage, covering roughly 1 in 5 Americans. Its purpose is to pay for essential medical care for the truly needy, not subsidize fringe elective treatments that endeavor to achieve the quixotic objective of altering someone’s biological sex, which most taxpayers already reject. According to an AP-NORC poll conducted in May, two-thirds of those surveyed are against Medicare or Medicaid funding these procedures for minors. Additionally, half disagree with government funding for adults. The program, at the crossroads of near infinite demand for medical services and finite resources to underwrite them, much of which is borrowed and then added to the existing $37 trillion in debt, is already buckling under unrealistic expectations and unrelenting financial pressures.

More critically, these destructive, life-changing interventions on children must never happen, with or without taxpayer subsidies. While couched in the lofty, yet Orwellian terminology of ‘gender affirming care,’ giving minors puberty blockers, hormones and/or performing surgery does irreparable damage to someone too young to fully comprehend the lifelong ramifications of such a decision. As stated in a previous column, many thousands have already undergone these procedures, with parents driven to support them either from the emotional blackmail and sheer terror of a potentially suicidal and subsequently dead child, or because they are afflicted with Transhausen-by-Proxy syndrome, often the mother.

Lastly, statistics related to transgender identification only reinforce the prevalence of a continuing social contagion that, while waning from recent highs, lingers as an affliction. According to a UCLA survey, 3.3% of 13- to 17-year-olds self-identify as transgender, which dwarfs a significantly lower 0.8% of adults and an average of only 1.0% of all those 13 and up. This isn’t a statistical anomaly so much as a statistical impossibility, analogous to the Public Religion Research Institute report finding that 28% of Gen Z adults identify as some sort of queer. Once again, statistically impossible.

The incessant mantra of radical trans rights advocacy groups has been to hyperbolically liken these and other potential restrictions to a genocide against those who identify as transgender. The reality, however, is that these proposed measures are intended to both protect those children suffering from gender dysphoria from the grossly irresponsible adults who would inflict this upon them, as well as taxpayers from having to pay for this continuing insanity. While they deserve the utmost compassion and sympathy for their illness, government’s only involvement in this should be centered on shutting it completely down.