Florida – The Biden administration is pleading with an appeals court to uphold a decision that Florida broke federal rules by forbidding Medicaid coverage for trans people seeking hormone therapy and puberty blockers.
The state Agency for Health Care Administration and politicians’ decisions to forbid coverage of the treatments, according to a brief submitted by attorneys from the U.S. Department of Justice and the United States Department of Health and Human Services, violated the Affordable Care Act and federal Medicaid laws.
The brief made reference to what it called “nondiscrimination requirements” in the Affordable Care Act in part. According to the statement, “Florida’s (coverage) exclusions target transgender people and prevent them from receiving care available to other Medicaid beneficiaries because of their sex assigned at birth.”
After U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle determined that the ban on Medicaid coverage for testosterone therapy and puberty blockers violated both federal law and the Equal Protection Clause, state attorneys filed an appeal in June at the Atlanta-based appeals court.
After the Agency for Health Care Administration issued a rule prohibiting coverage, the lawsuit was filed last year on behalf of two transgender people and their families. This spring, the petition was updated to include a new state law that also barred coverage.
Gov. Restricting treatments for trans people with gender dysphoria has become a top priority for Ron DeSantis and many other Republican leaders across the nation in recent years. Gender dysphoria is medically defined by the federal government as “significant distress that a person may feel when sex or sex assigned at birth is not the same as their identity.”
The Biden administration’s brief from this week has also been accompanied by briefs from other states and businesses across the nation in response to the state appeal of Hinkle’s ruling. In October, 18 Democratic state attorneys general commonly signed a friend-of-the-court brief pleading with the appeals court to uphold Hinkle’s decision. This year, a brief supporting the decision was signed by Democratic attorneys general from 19 states and the District of Columbia.
Minors and adults were covered by the Medicaid insurance ban, but the majority of discussion in Florida and other states has been about whether or not minors should be able to get hormone therapy and puberty blockers.
The state’s attorneys stated in a brief submitted in October to the appeals court that the issue at hand is “whether public funds should be used to pay for these treatments.”
According to the brief, “it’s a health and welfare issue, and it has to do with medical policy.” “It’s a place where the state gets to decide where to draw the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable.”
However, proponents of the ban have argued that a number of significant health institutions support making the treatments accessible. Hinkle ruled that there was no “rational basis” for the state to absolutely forbid or deny Medicaid coverage for these treatments. There is no evidence in the record that these therapies significantly worsened the medical outcomes of patients who were properly screened and treated.
