Biden administration revives anti-bias protections in health care for transgender people
Source: Washington Post
The Biden administration said Monday it would provide protections against discrimination in health care based on gender identity and sexual orientation, reversing a policy of its predecessors that had been a priority for social conservatives and had infuriated civil liberties advocates. The reversal is a victory for transgender people and undoes what had been a significant setback in the movement for LGBTQ rights. The shift pertains to health-care providers and other organizations that receive funding from the Department of Health and Human Services. Civil rights groups had said the Trump policy would allow health-care workers and institutions, as well as insurers, to deny services to transgender individuals.
The reversal is the latest step Biden officials are taking to reorient the federal government’s posture on health care, the environment and other policy areas away from the conservative cast of the Trump era, replacing it with a more progressive stance. Senior HHS officials said in a statement early Monday that a Supreme Court ruling last year gave them grounds to extend an earlier definition, adopted by the Obama administration, of a piece of an anti-discrimination section of the Affordable Care Act, which outlaws bias “on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability.”
Since the law was created in 2010, an ideological debate has raged over what forbidding discrimination based “on sex” means. Obama officials had interpreted it to include protections for people who are transgender. That stance was vigorously opposed by religious liberties advocates and other social conservatives who were a crucial bloc in former president Donald Trump’s political base. In 2019, Trump health officials proposed a rewrite of that definition in a way that eliminated protections based on gender and sexual orientation in its grants programs.
The altered federal rule became final last June. HHS said at the time that those anti-discrimination provisions apply only to “male or female as determined by biology.” It described the change as part of efforts to remove “costly and unnecessary regulatory burdens” that it said were costing American taxpayers $2.9 billion. Three days later, in a case unrelated to HHS’s actions, the Supreme Court ruled that a landmark 1960s federal civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers, a watershed decision for LGBTQ rights.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/transgender-protection-hhs/2021/05/10/0852ce88-b17d-11eb-a980-a60af976ed44_story.html
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