One Attack After Another…

We have been under constant attacks by the Trump administration, this time attacking our healthcare.

Trump Plan Would Cut Back Health Care Protections for Transgender People
New York Times
By Robert Pear
April 21, 2018

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration says it plans to roll back a rule issued by President Barack Obama that prevents doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies from discriminating against transgender people.

Advocates said the change could jeopardize the significant gains that transgender people have seen in access to medical care, including gender reassignment procedures — treatments for which many insurers denied coverage in the past.

The rule was adopted in 2016 to carry out a major civil rights law embedded in the Affordable Care Act. The law prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability in “any health program or activity” that receives federal financial assistance.

The Obama administration said the rule covered “almost all practicing physicians in the United States” because they accept some form of federal remuneration or reimbursement. It applies, for example, to hospitals that accept Medicare and doctors who receive Medicaid payments, as well as to insurers that participate in health insurance marketplaces.

Trump administration officials said they believed they had to modify the rule because a federal judge in Texas had found that parts of it were unlawful.
[...]
But eight states, a network of Roman Catholic hospitals and the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, representing 19,000 doctors, challenged the Obama-era rule. A federal district judge in Texas temporarily stopped enforcement of the protections for transgender patients, saying that Congress had outlawed discrimination based on sex — “the biological differences between males and females” — but not transgender status.

Yeah but about a dozen other judges have found that the law does cover us and the Supreme Court did back in the 80’s, the court ruled that sex stereotyping is a form of sex discrimination.

But Jennifer C. Pizer, the law and policy director at Lambda Legal, a gay rights group, said, “That is an excruciatingly narrow and legally incorrect definition of the term ‘sex’ that would jeopardize legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.”
[…]
In recent years, some courts have held that federal sex discrimination laws do apply to discrimination against transgender people, as the Obama administration said.

Judge Susan Richard Nelson of the Federal District Court in Minnesota has found that the Affordable Care Act protects people who “allege discrimination based on ‘gender identity’” — a person’s internal sense of gender, which may differ from the sex listed on the person’s birth certificate.

Let’s face it Trump is a liar. He said he supported us during the campaign but now he has Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council whispering hate in his ear along with all the other bigots who hide behind religion.