All Health Breaks Loose on Gender Mandate

What kind of country forces Marines to scavenge parts to keep their planes flying, but has no problem paying fornew parts for the gender-confused? Yours! Welcome to the sick world of the Obama administration, where taxpayer-funded sex changes are just the latest example of a presidency completely off the rails.

Turns out, the White House was pretty busy last Friday after it dropped the bathroom bombshell on public schools. After threatening to pull federal funds from districts that protect the privacy of their students in locker rooms and showers, the administration took its agenda from the principal’s office to the doctor’s office. In a quiet rule change, Health and Human Services lowered the transgender boom on every hospital, physician, and insurer in America. Under these new regulations, which lean on the same radical interpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the Department of Education’s order, “sex discrimination” in health care has been unilaterally rewritten by HHS to include “gender identity” -- something Congress never intended when it passed the statute a half-century ago. But when has the plain language of the law ever stopped this administration?

Certainly not in this instance, when it’s demanding that the entire health care industry include gender transition treatments as part of their services. Refuse, the president’s team warns, and kiss your Medicare and Medicaid dollars goodbye. And it gets worse: the rule doesn’t include a single religious exemption. In other words, as our own David Christensen pointed out to Breitbart, “this intolerant and unjust rule… forces health care providers to participate in and perform services that substantially violate their consciences.” Heritage’s Ryan Anderson takes it a step further: “They will effectively require controversial procedures, such as ‘sex-reassignment’ surgery, that respected medical professionals argue have not been proven to be effective in treating serious mental health conditions. Rather than respect the diversity of opinions on sensitive and controversial health care issues, the proposed regulations endorse and enforce one view.”

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