by Susan Quinn
How many years have we been discussing these abominable transgender treatments on children? And how long have doctors insisted on practicing them, in spite of all the evidence condemning them?
A recent report from the medical watchdog group Do No Harm explains the latest abuses in the medical community, revealing how medical codes can be misapplied in order to reap the profits of “transgender care.” Their behavior is especially abhorrent, because they’re administering these treatments to children, who have enough stress in their pre-teen and teen years without “experts” promoting gender dysphoria to them. These procedures are so sufficiently despicable that many states have banned them for children. To date, 27 states have passed policies and imposed penalties on doctors who provide children with “gender-affirming care.”
The report lists the red flags for doctors trying to disguise what they are doing:
The report identifies eight codes that may be the most likely to hide child ‘transition’ interventions from insurers and regulators, including hypopituitarism, other primary ovarian failure, testicular hypofunction, precocious puberty, other specified endocrine disorders, unspecified endocrine disorder, hormone replacement therapy, and hypertrophy of breast.
Activist organizations continue to feed the frenzy by encouraging doctors to pursue these interventions, and provide information on how to manipulate the medical codes. Those offending groups include WPATH, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, the Campaign for Southern Equality, and QueerDoc.
Providing “gender-affirming care” (GAC) treatments can be quite lucrative, ranging from $5,000 for facial surgery to $50,000 for a phalloplasty; there can be additional charges for using a facility, pathology reports, and anesthesia. When weighing the financial benefits against the ethical costs, some doctors find the temptation too great.
The federal government tried to put pressure on doctors to discourage them from treating children:
In social media posts Monday, the FBI and its chief spokesperson asked for tips on ‘any hospitals or clinics who break the law and mutilate children under the guise of ‘gender affirming care.’
But experts say the FBI’s new push isn’t backed up by federal law and may only be intended to scare medical practitioners away from offering those services.
Still, the federal government is taking steps to make practicing these procedures less beneficial for the doctors. HHS is working on defunding hospitals who use these interventions with children under 18, as well as stopping Medicaid funds that have been given to the states for these procedures. In addition, HHS published a report that stated that there was no justification for chemically castrating children or mutilating their genitals on the basis of mental illness.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. also identified another approach to stopping these treatments:
Using statutory authority under 42 CFR 1001.2, which allows the HHS secretary to declare a treatment modality not to be safe and effective, Kennedy will sign a document stating that practitioners who employ ‘gender transition’ interventions as a treatment modality ‘will be deemed not to meet professionally recognized standards of health care,’ another HHS official stated.
Until the punishments are harsher, some doctors will continue to evade the law, while other organizations will try to stop them:
Do No Harm has done extensive work and continues to actively work toward establishing distinct medical diagnosis codes for gender transition, desistance, and detransition. This new report urges payors and regulators, particularly in the states that have legislation restricting such interventions on minors, to remain vigilant of the misuse of ICD-10 codes.
The more we publicize this abhorrent practice, the greater opportunities we will have to protect our children.
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