November 8, 2012

Okay - so who pays for this?

From our local newspaper - the Bellingham Herald:
Calif. city plans to provide transgender surgeries
San Francisco is preparing to become the first U.S. city to provide and cover the cost of sex reassignment surgeries for uninsured transgender residents.

The city's Health Commission voted Tuesday to create a comprehensive program for treating transgender people experiencing mental distress because of the mismatch between their bodies and their gender identities. San Francisco already provides transgender residents with hormones, counseling and routine health services, but has stopped short of offering surgical interventions, Public Health Director Barbara Garcia said Thursday after the vote was announced.

The idea for a new program that included surgeries came out of conversations between public health officials and transgender rights advocates who wanted mastectomies, genital reconstructions and other surgeries that are recommended for some transgender people covered under San Francisco's 5-year-old universal health care plan.

At the urging of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco-based Transgender Law Center, the commission agreed this week to drop sex reassignment surgery from the list of procedures specifically excluded from the Healthy San Francisco plan.
Nice idea but... Who is going to pay for this? The total number of sexually different in the US population is about 3.4% -- you walk past thirty people and one of them is gay. Big deal. Why are they asking for and getting such preferential treatment? Granted, by nature, they flock to "gay friendly" locales so the population is concentrated there. Still, why such preferential treatment? I had to have foot surgery and even though I had insurance at the time, I still had to pay a couple thousand bucks out-of-pocket costs as it was elective "cosmetic" surgery. Cosmetic in that a bone process had grown out of the side of my big toe such that anything but a sandal was painful and the process was so large that I could not put on my steel-toed boots. It prevented me from working. Why wasn't that covered for free? How about people that need to take statins or insulin -- where are their free meds? Posted by DaveH at November 8, 2012 7:33 PM
Comments

I believe that all medically-necessary care should be covered - including transition-related care which has been deemed medically necessary by the AMA. It sounds like perhaps your foot surgery was indeed medically necessary, and it is sad you couldn't get your surgery covered by insurance. No one should have to go into debt to be their healthy authentic selves.

Posted by: Mark at November 8, 2012 11:35 PM
Post a comment









Remember personal info?