Greg welcomes guests Andrew Klavan and Sherrod Small.
Obama administration clears way for taxpayer-funded sex-change surgery
The taxpayer-funded agency in question is Medicare, so if you have a grandma or grandpa who's itching to endure complex surgery and hormone therapy to rid themselves of a gender they've already lived with for 65 years or more, good news. Help is on the way.
Sort of.
The demand for sex-reassignment surgery among septuagenarians is small, as you might expect, and the new ruling doesn't guarantee that a request for coverage will be granted as medically necessary. It simply says that Medicare is no longer required to deny coverage. It's a gesture, designed to nudge Obama's new best friends in the insurance industry to follow suit and to impress his base, particularly during a week when transsexuals are already in the news. And it's not the first time he's used health-care policy for ideological/gestural reasons, either. (Here's another gesture in the news, albeit outside the health-care realm.) Releasing this today, with the public distracted by Shinseki and the VA, is a smart bit of media management by the White House and HHS. People who care about this subject will notice. Most people who don't, won't.
The Army recently refused to provide Bradley/Chelsea Manning with taxpayer-funded reassignment surgery but has begun to look into transferring him to a civilian prison so that he can get treatment. That's an interesting accommodation for a person who's doing time for espionage.Also read: Parents Encourage 5-Year-Old to Change Gender
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