President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and spending budget, lovingly dubbed the “one big, beautiful, bill,” strips Medicaid’s funding for transgender surgeries — a move that will impact a large portion of such procedures if it passes the Senate.
The reconciliation budget, which narrowly passed the House of Representatives early Thursday morning in a 215-214-1 vote, would have initially prohibited Medicaid from covering “gender transition procedures” for children, until a late Wednesday amendment struck the words “minors” and “under 18 years of age” from that section, the Independent reported.
Gender transition treatments that would no longer be covered include puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries.
A 2023 study by gynecologists from Columbia University and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, revealed that a staggering 25 percent of so-called “gender-affirming” surgeries in the United States are covered by Medicaid.
Out of the 48,019 patients identified in the report who underwent such surgeries, over 12,000 were Medicaid recipients.
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