HHS Intends To Force Mandatory Access To Sex Changes (Even For Kids) … Abortions, Too

Is there anything the Democrats like better than to leverage the power of government to force public companies to shove leftist agendas down America’s throat?

Biden ran as the ‘alternative’ to the hard-left socialists of his party, claiming to have defeated them.

He promised to be the President of ‘all Americans’ and put an end to divisions. With the razor-thin margin of victory in the elections and the Senate actually deadlocked at 50-50, you’d think that would be a cue for him to govern as a moderate.

Anyone who thought that he would lead as a moderate was quickly disabused of that mistake.

If anything, Old Joe has tacked so far to the left that the rest of his party is struggling to keep up. Here’s another example to add to the growing list.

Now Joe’s administration is tweaking the rules to add yet another onerous burden to the insurance providers that will either bankrupt those insurance providers that survived Obama’s original recipe or else make costs for the ordinary person skyrocket.

It has massive implications across the entire medical system of all 50 states as well.

Activists are using their favorite tool to accomplish this ‘fundamental change’ of the American system. They are reinventing language itself. (Orwell’s NewSpeak comes to mind.)

Small changes in the language of policy will extend health care coverage to obligate procedures that were not in the original calculations of the actuaries. This includes coverage of abortion (whether or not it was part of the original policy) as well as life-long medical treatment of anyone who has concluded that the sexual organs of the body they were born into need to be surgically altered.

You can read the changes to HHS language here.

From the summary portion:

…Section 1557 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in certain health programs and activities. Section 1557(c) of the ACA authorizes the Secretary of the Department to promulgate regulations to implement the nondiscrimination requirements of Section 1557. The Department is also proposing to revise its interpretation regarding whether Medicare Part B constitutes federal financial assistance for purposes of civil rights enforcement and to revise nondiscrimination provisions to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in regulations issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) governing Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP); Programs of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE); health insurance issuers and their officials, employees, agents, and representatives; States and the Exchanges carrying out Exchange requirements; agents, brokers, or web-brokers that assist with or facilitate 1 enrollment of qualified individuals, qualified employers, or qualified employees; issuers providing essential health benefits; and qualified health plan issuers.

The Daily Signal offered this criticism of the policy.

In a conference call with reporters, Melanie Fontes Rainer, acting director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, said that under the proposed changes, the definition of discrimination based on “sex” would be expanded to include gender identity, sexual orientation, and abortion.
…Roger Severino, vice president for domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation, sees the rule change as dangerous for children. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
“This rule will mandate that insurance companies cover the full menu of gender identity interventions such as mastectomies, hysterectomies, breast augmentation, hair removal, and a lifetime of cross-sex hormones, including for minor children,” said Severino, who headed HHS’ Office for Civil Rights during the Trump administration.
“It would also force doctors to perform cross-sex surgeries and to administer puberty blockers to children if they believe such interventions ‘can never be beneficial,’” he said.
…This change of the rules “flips medicine on its head,” he argued.
Severino also said medical providers will lose federal funding even if they follow state law prohibiting medical gender interventions for minors. —DailySignal

ClashDaily has a few observations to add:

If you get federal funding or are regulated by a federal agency — including Medicare, Medicaid, Elder Care, Health insurance, and yes, even individual STATES — are obligated to accept this administrative bureaucratic workaround explicitly designed to over-rule the independent authority of individual states to govern themselves according to the will of their own citizens.

In other words: every health care plan and healthcare provider — in all 50 states — will be obligated to facilitate abortions. Specific language in these changes identifies pregnancy status as something that cannot be ‘discriminated against’ while implying/asserting a ‘constitutional right’ to abortion.

They will also be obligated to facilitate what has been called ‘sex reassignment surgery’ which is a clinical-sounding term for what amounts to the castration and removal of a healthy penis and testicles in boys, or the surgical removal of healthy breast tissue for girls — as well as the surgery designed to approximate the genitals of the opposite sex.

It was only a hundred years ago that some states legalizing the deliberate sterilization of people became a blot on our history. Now our federal government is putting a gun to the head of everyone who would object to performing such an irreversible change on someone deemed too young and irresponsible to enter into a legal binding contract or order a beer with dinner.

Furthermore, such drastic plastic surgery ain’t cheap. A quick search of pricing suggested so-called ‘bottom’ surgery could run between $50k-$100k. But another site gave a much higher price point:

‘Phalloplasty procedures may run as high as $150,000 depending on the nature of the surgeries and what else is done at the same time.- YourPlasticSurgeryGuide

That doesn’t even address the additional cost of modifying the patient’s upper torso.

As soon as anything even tangential to a gender question enters the conversation, a number of survivors are describing their experience as having been pushed into a one-size-fits-all solution.

It was a ‘solution’ that should never have been rushed, one with radical social and physiological implications, with no further exploration of whether there may be some kind of underlying condition driving the current dissatisfaction.

For example, what kind of a hellscape would Biden’s aggressive ‘affirming’ model damn patients in future situations like these ones endure?

   Several participants also described being misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria while the real causes for their issues went neglected.
A young woman named Allie, who struggled with suicide attempts sexual abuse, and difficulty relating to other girls growing up, said she began receiving cross-sex hormones at age 18 based on a mere half-hour consultation with “no explorative therapy,” and while the treatment seemed to be the answer for a year, she found herself attempting suicide again at age 20 and was later found to have previously-undiagnosed autism. Another participant, Laura Becker, relayed a similar story of transitioning in a futile attempt to solve mental issues that actually stemmed from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from emotional and psychiatric abuse.
“Limpida, aged 24, said he felt pushed into transitioning after seeking help at a Planned Parenthood clinic,” Medscape reports. “He identified as trans at age 15 and spent years attempting to be a woman socially, but every step made him feel more miserable, he said. When he went to the clinic at age 21 to get estrogen, he said he felt like the staff was dismissive of his mental health concerns — including that he was suicidal, had substance abuse, and was severely depressed. He was told he was the ‘perfect candidate’ for transitioning.
‘A year later, he said he felt worse,” the report continues. “The nurse suggested he seek out surgery. After Limpida researched what was involved, he decided to detransition. He has since received an autism diagnosis.” —LifeSite

These people charged ahead with ‘treatment’ that destroys healthy tissue… only to discover that in their medical experts’ haste to shove these patients into a ‘trans’ diagnosis these supposed experts were blind to what was ACTUALLY wrong with them. Or was it just tunnel-vision?

How many more innocent lives will be similarly shipwrecked for no other reason than the obstinance of Democrats hellbent on radically transforming society into their own ‘woke’ utopian image?

These ideologues don’t care about any of the various harms that can be listed as easily predicted outcomes of this extra-legislative ideological power grab.

They don’t care how it will gut health care. They don’t care about the people that will wind up sterile and regret it. They only care that their aggressive agenda keeps marching forward… consequences be damned.

There is room for optimism, though. Because of the enormous costs associated with such an ambitious agenda, it must surely trigger the Major Questions doctrine where similarly aggressive overreach by the EPA was struck down by SCOTUS last month.

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