Yesterday’s Supreme Court Non-Decision

Yesterday the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of a lower court ruling overturning a Wisconsin law banning treatment to inmates that diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder and the refusal has created quite a stir among conservatives. An article in the Christian Science Monitor by Warren Richey, who writes,

The US Supreme Court declined Monday to take up a case examining whether transgender prison inmates enjoy a constitutional right to government-funded sex change operations and hormone therapy.

The action leaves undisturbed a federal appeals court decision siding with transgender inmates in Wisconsin.

Concerned about the use of state funding for ongoing hormone treatments that help certain male inmates look more female, lawmakers in Wisconsin passed the Inmate Sex Change Prevention Act. The law barred the use of any state funds for hormone treatments and/or sexual reassignment surgery.

Three Wisconsin inmates filed a class-action lawsuit. After a trial a federal judge struck down the 2006 law as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. A panel of the Chicago-based Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.

The appeals court noted that the Eighth Amendment requires state governments to provide medically-necessary treatment to inmates in their prison populations.

I think that the key to the case is in the last paragraph, “medically-necessary treatment”, because the AMA, APA, WPATH, Endocrine Society and the IRS all say that hormones, surgery and therapy are all medically-necessary for people who have been diagnosed gender identity disorder (GID). The courts said that it should be a doctor and not a politician who decide the proper medical treatment for inmate. The article goes on to say,

The appeals court did not rule that prison officials are required to provide hormone therapy or sex change operations, only that such treatments must be available to inmates if the prison’s own medical personnel determine they are medically necessary.

“Surely, had the Wisconsin legislature passed a law that [Department of Corrections] inmates with cancer must be treated only with therapy and pain killers, this court would have no trouble concluding that the law was unconstitutional,” the Seventh Circuit said. “Refusing to provide effective treatment for a serious medical condition serves no valid penological purpose and amounts to torture,” the appeals court said.

In other words, let the doctors decide.

I think that this ruling can have farther ramifications, can Medicare, Medicaid or here in Connecticut the Charter Oak Health Plan, still exclude coverage for people who have been diagnosed with GID?