The federal government’s ardent promotion of “sex-rejecting” medical procedures for minors during the Biden administration inspired hundreds of hospitals and health care systems, many of them publicly funded, to establish pediatric gender programs that made tens of millions of dollars using illegal billing practices to get the questionable treatments approved. More than 225 health care centers established “pediatric gender programs,” billing nearly $120 million since 2019, according to an investigation conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In a lengthy report made public recently the agency documents its findings and they are downright outrageous. “This report exposes, for the first time, the involvement of hospitals in promoting life-altering drugs and surgeries for children who express discomfort with their sex,” HHS writes. “The stories of young boys and girls who sought to course-correct from the medical journeys designed to stunt and maim their natural bodies and functions all tell the same tale: there was no course-correction available.”
Over 5,500 surgical procedures and 8,500 courses of hormones or blockers were administered to kids, with individual flagship programs reporting multimillion-dollar billings. Certain large children’s hospitals have seen gender-clinic revenue streams balloon in recent years, the HHS probe confirms. Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and Boston Children’s Hospital are among the top grossing providers, with over $8.2 million and $6.5 million respectively in total billed charges for transgender-related services to minors between 2019 and 2023. That amounts to more than $1 million a year during each of those five years, a rarity in pediatric medicine. “In an era of razor-thin pediatric margins and pressure on hospital reimbursements, this new patient cohort—young, insured or Medicaid-eligible, and requiring perpetual follow-ups—represented a strategic area of growth,” the HHS report states. “Endocrinology and surgery departments gained volume and prestige, while hospital administrators gained a reliable revenue line that helps subsidize lower-margin services.”
Around $50 million was billed for puberty blockers that were illegally coded using a fake endocrine disorder diagnostic, the probe found. Nearly $11 million in claims were filed for patients 13 to 17 using a precocious puberty diagnosis that is highly uncommon. “Healthcare providers were able to turn a tidy profit from these procedures: children who transitioned were placed on a course that would require expensive drugs, surgeries, and lifelong medical interventions,” the HHS report reads. The document cites a multitude of examples of clinics in multiple states situated within major academic medical centers, large private hospital systems, and community-based centers. The institutions and providers participate in federal programs including Medicaid and Medicare that treat children, adolescents and adults and they profit immensely from providing the services for what the left calls “gender dysphoria.” HHS determined that many providers of sex-rejecting procedures systemically diagnose minors with physical conditions they do not have to secure insurance coverage for controversial regimens like “breast removal or hormonal treatment” that might not otherwise be covered by private insurance or taxpayer-funded programs like Medicaid. The pediatric gender clinics are revenue boosters, which helps explain their rapid proliferation and resistance to concerning evidence showing poor safety and efficacy of the procedures.
Kids were not the only victims of this lucrative gender medicine push. The report also reveals that the Biden administration promoted and expanded access to gender affirming procedures through executive orders, HHS civil rights guidance, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) mandates and federal employee health benefits, pressuring hospitals and insurers to cover them for adults as well as minors. The former president issued an executive order directing government agencies to provide federal employees with healthcare coverage for comprehensive gender affirming care. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) ordered carriers of federal employee health benefits programs to cover gender affirming care such as hormone therapy, genital, and breast surgeries as well as facial “gender affirming surgeries.” Even the Department of Defense (DOD) provided taxpayer-funded coverage of sex-rejecting procedures, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent millions of taxpayer dollars on research related to sex-rejecting procedures such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for youth.
