No surprise here, but San Francisco is preparing to become the first U.S. city to provide and cover the cost of sex reassignment surgeries for uninsured transgender residents.
According to the Associated Press:
“The city’s Health Commission voted Tuesday to create a comprehensive program for treating transgender people experiencing mental distress because of the mismatch between their bodies and their gender identities. San Francisco already provides transgender residents with hormones, counseling and routine health services, but has stopped short of offering surgical interventions, Public Health Director Barbara Garcia said Thursday after the vote was announced.
“The idea for a new program that included surgeries came out of conversations between public health officials and transgender rights advocates who wanted mastectomies, genital reconstructions and other surgeries that are recommended for some transgender people covered under San Francisco’s 5-year-old universal health care plan.
“San Francisco in 2001 became the first city in the country to cover sex reassignment surgeries for government employees. Last year, Portland, Ore., did the same. The number of major U.S. companies covering the cost of gender reassignment surgery for transgender workers also doubled last year, reflecting a decades-long push by transgender activists to get insurance companies to treat such surgeries as medically necessary instead of elective procedures.”
Garcia said the city could “probably manage this over the next three years without much of a budget increase because we already have these (other) services covered by the Healthy San Francisco Plan, the city’s five-year-old universal health care plan.” And Kathryn Steuerman, a member of a transgender health advocacy group in San Francisco, is relieved that transgenders don’t have to go into debt to finance “gender transition.”
Although there are differences between the Healthy San Francisco Plan and Obamacare, this move reminds me of the HHS mandate for Christian employers to fund abortion-inducing drugs. How can San Francisco expect Christians to use tax dollars to pay for unnecessary surgery—and maybe even more tax dollars? Why should Christians pay for people to change their bodies into something God never created them to be? Discuss.
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