Insurance Coverage, What Is It Worth?

You heard the right wing saying that they don’t want to pay for our surgeries and healthcare, well there is a new study that shows that it is actually cheaper to pay for our healthcare than not paying.

Health insurance coverage for transgender people is cost-effective, study finds
News-Medical.Net
Published on November 25, 2015

A new analysis led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that while most U.S. health insurance plans deny benefits to transgender men and women for medical care necessary to transition to the opposite sex, paying for sex reassignment surgery and hormones is actually cost-effective.

The researchers, reporting online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, say that the cost of surgery and hormones is not significantly higher than the cost of treatment for depression, substance abuse and HIV/AIDS, all of which are highly prevalent in those who are transgender but are not in a position to medically transition to the opposite sex. In 2014, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services began paying for sex reassignment surgery and other transitional care, after a 33-year-ban on covering those costs was lifted.

"Providing health care benefits to transgender people makes economic sense," says study leader William V. Padula, PhD, MS, MSc, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the Bloomberg School. "Many insurance companies have said that it's not worth it to pay for these services for transgender people. Our study shows they don't have an economic leg to stand on when they decide to deny coverage. This is a small population of people and we can do them a great service without a huge financial impact on society."
[…]
The new analysis calculated that the cost to cover transgender people would be fewer than two pennies per month for every person with health insurance coverage in the United States.

"We would be paying a very small incremental amount to improve the quality of life for a population that is extremely disenfranchised from health care and other services we consider a right," Padula says. "For this small investment for a small number of people, we could improve their lives significantly and make them more productive members of society."

And what is the cost savings of just preventing one trans people who tries to take their own life? What is the cost savings of trans people who can now live a productive life instead making their living off the street?