Health Care For Us.

On the NCTE blog there was a post about the Affordable Care Act (ACA – Obamacare) and a court ruling saying that our health care is covered by the ACA,

Court: Obamacare Protects Trans People in Health Care Settings

For the first time, a federal court has confirmed that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) prohibits discrimination against transgender people by any health care provider accepting federal funds. In the case of a young transgender man who says he was badly mistreated in a Minnesota hospital, the court ruled Monday that Section 1557 of the ACA prohibits gender identity discrimination under the umbrella of sex discrimination, and that by accepting Medicare and Medicaid funds the hospital was subject to the law.

In the lawsuit, the young man states that he went to the emergency room last year with his mother—herself a medical professional—with painful genitourinary symptoms. While in the hospital for six days, he says he was repeatedly misgendered, ridiculed, given careless and assaultive exams, and otherwise provided untimely and inferior care because he is transgender. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is still separately investigating the case. The hospital and the group that employs its ER physicians urged the court to dismiss the suit, saying they were not covered by the law, that it didn’t prohibit anti-trans bias, and that the patient’s complaints were nothing more than “perceived slights” rather than serious discrimination. The court rejected all these contentions, saying the suit, brought by Minnesota-based advocacy group Gender Justice and captioned Rumble v. Fairview Health Services, could go forward.

This is really good for us, it can help fill in the gaps for insurance coverage, one of the problems with insurance coverage was those who had insurance polices written in Connecticut or Medicare were covered but those who had insurance coverage based on ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act) were not covered. So this may be another tool to use to get insurance for those under ERISA.