A group of blue states plus the District of Columbia has joined together in a lawsuit aimed at the Trump administration's plan to put an end to gender affirming care. The lawsuit is a response to rules announced last week by HHS.
The Trump administration is moving to broadly curtail gender transition care for young people, proposing Thursday to eject medical providers from major federal health insurance programs if they provide services including hormone therapy or procedures such as mastectomies to children and teenagers.
The rules, if finalized, could result in a wide-scale contraction of the availability of transition services for children. As the single largest payer for health care in the United States, the federal government has enormous sway over hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices, which rely heavily on reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid. The proposed regulations would prevent those providers from receiving funding for any type of medical visit if they also offer youth transition care.
“We are done with junk science driven by ideological pursuits, not the well-being of children,” said Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said at a news conference that he signed a declaration Thursday saying that “sex-rejecting procedures pose medical dangers of lasting harm on children who receive these interventions.”
The lawsuit is an attempt to strike down the HHS rule.
“Secretary Kennedy cannot unilaterally change medical standards by posting a document online,” Letitia James, attorney general of New York, one of the states in the lawsuit, said in a statement on Tuesday. “And no one should lose access to medically necessary health care because their federal government tried to interfere in decisions that belong in doctors’ offices.”...
The suit, which asks that the court strike down Mr. Kennedy’s declaration, was filed in federal court in Oregon by the attorney general of that state, Dan Rayfield. Defendants named in the lawsuit include Mr. Kennedy and the Department of Health and Human Services.
The suit was joined by California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia. All of the states have Democratic-controlled legislatures or a Democratic governor, or both...
“By attempting to impose a single nationwide standard and threatening to punish providers who adhere to well-established, evidence-based care, HHS is unlawfully interfering in decisions that should be made by doctors and their patients,” Ms. James’s office said in a statement on Tuesday.
Letitita James and the other blue state AGs are really eager to trans kids and they don't want the Trump administration stopping them. That said, it's not clear if such a rule can be instituted at the federal level. The Supreme Court has already backstopped doing it at the state level.
About half the states have already banned gender transition care for minors. The Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of those laws earlier this year when it upheld a Tennessee law that bans young people from transition treatments that include hormones and puberty blockers.
The complaint says the declaration violates states’ rights and names several state laws that protect gender transition care. In Oregon, for example, a law enacted in 2023 guarantees coverage for all medically necessary gender-transition care services under commercial insurance, the Oregon Health Plan and public employee health plans. In California, the Department of Health Care Services requires that its state Medicaid program provide gender-transition care under it’s health plan.
“Untreated gender dysphoria can have devastating impacts to the mental health and wellbeing of those youth and adolescents,” the complaint asserts. “For many patients, medically necessary gender-affirming care is life-saving.”
So we'll have to see where this goes but even if some court eventually sides with the Trump administration, that would potentially leave open the possibility of some future Democratic administration reversing the rules and attempting to enforce it on states who have blocked gender affirming care.
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