How's Your Health?

Does your insurance cover trans-issues? Does it cover a therapist? Does it cover Gender Conforming Surgery? Does it cover cross-gender hormone therapy? Does it cover complications do to you being transgender? If you had surgery will it cover and if your gender marker had been changed will the insurance cover problems with your birth gender organs? These are question that we think about, but they are just the questions about health care and they don’t even cover what we think about when we go to the doctors office.

When we walk into the doctor’s office we worry about how we will be treated. Will we be thrown out of the office? Will we be hidden in a separate room so as not to “freak-out” the other patients. Will we be laughed at and called “it”? These are all real issues. I know people who have made an appointment with a doctor only to be turned away when they found out that they are trans. I know a friend who was taken to an emergency room after a fall, she heard them talking about her and referring to her as “it” and they sent her home without x-rays telling to take two aspirin. There is a case where “one clinic isolates trans clients from the waiting room-- immediately taking them away from the other patients to an empty room in the back and making them wait all alone.”

In the California Healthline yesterday they had an article “Transgender Patients in Rural Areas Struggle To Access Health Services” in it they said…

Axil Cricchio -- a social science professor at California State University-Monterey Bay and a transgender man -- said that even though most health care services sought by transgender patients are no different from those sought by other patients, transgender individuals still face significant discrimination from health care providers.

Cricchio said, "The stress of visiting a health care provider who is not aware of transgender issues can keep transgender people from seeking any heath care needs for fear of being outed or mistreated at health facilities."

The 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that 24% of those surveyed 25% report denied treatment in a doctor’s office or a hospital and 24% said that they were harassed or disrespected there.

In addition, doctors who treat trans-patients maybe shunned. Doctors who preform GCS have a difficult time securing hospital privilege at hospitals. That was one of the reasons why Dr. Bowers moved out of Trinidad CO. In the Edge last week they had an article about a trans-clinic in Philadelphia and the doctor there said.

"Most hospitals in the Delaware Valley do not give privileges to surgeons to perform transgender surgery," Leis [Dr. Sherman Leis, founder of The Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery,] told EDGE. "There is no clear reason why they do this and my thoughts are that they remain uneducated about transgender issues and, in fact, many are outright discriminatory in their practices even though their by-laws state they do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, or gender."

But all is not bleak, also yesterday it was reported in the Edge that Brown University is covering trans-people medical expenses

The Brown Daily Herald, Brown University’s student newspaper, has announced that the college’s new health insurance plan will cover "14 different sexual reassignment surgery procedures starting in August."

Brown University Director of Insurance and Purchasing Services Jeanne Herbert confirmed the health plan change in an email to the newspaper. "We identified this as an important benefit for students to have access to," Hebert wrote.

Brown will join several other schools and healthcare providers around the country that cover reassignment surgeries. Hebert said the school’s policy change was in line with "Brown’s efforts to support all students."

Also you may remember last month that California and Oregon insurance regulators have told health insurance companies to stop denying coverage for transgender patients because of their gender identity.