Do No Harm is celebrating. Under a rule finalized last week by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the bill for irreversibly damaging sex-denying interventions for children will no longer fall on federal taxpayers.
We have long called for such a measure. Earlier this year, for example, in response to CMS’s request for comment on the proposed rule, Do No Harm submitted a response arguing that the potential regulation was praiseworthy for two central reasons.
First, because so-called gender-affirming care is a “medical scandal,” the proposed rule was a critical step to protect children, interrupting as it did the funding pipeline by which harmful interventions were frequently performed.
Second, because cracks had already begun to appear — in both the U.S. and Europe — in the alleged transgender consensus, it was inaccurate to say that the medical establishment uniformly supported “gender-affirming care” for minors.
CMS has now accepted this reasoning. As the new rule’s “summary” makes clear, “[s]tate Medicaid plan[s] must provide that the Medicaid agency will not make payment under the plan for sex-rejecting procedures for children under 18.” Moreover, the rule “prohibits the use of Federal Medicaid dollars to fund sex-rejecting procedures for individuals under the age of 18” (emphasis added).
And there’s more. State Children’s Health Insurance Program plans (CHIP) must also henceforth “provide that the CHIP agency will not make payment under the plan for sex-rejecting procedures for children under 19.” Here, too, the prohibition is also federal: The new rule “prohibits the use of Federal CHIP dollars to fund sex-rejecting procedures for individuals under the age of 19.”
Do No Harm lauds CMS and Administrator Mehmet Oz, MD. Yet we also look forward to a future in which sex-rejecting procedures will no longer be performed on minors at all.
Until then, the question of payment is an important one. Taxpayers shouldn’t be made to open their wallets for false and detrimental “care.”
