Florida to bar Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care

Transgender Medicaid recipients in Florida will no longer be able to use Medicaid to cover gender-affirming health care under a new state rule that will take effect later this month.

 

The rule published Wednesday by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), which controls most of the state’s Medicaid program, eliminates coverage for gender-affirming health care for transgender Floridians of all ages. It will go into effect Aug. 21.

 

Under the rule, Florida residents will no longer be allowed to use Medicaid to help pay for puberty blockers, hormones, gender-affirming surgeries or “any other procedures that alter primary or secondary sexual characteristics” when those procedures are used to treat gender dysphoria.

 

Advocates outraged: In a joint statement on Thursday, Lambda Legal, the Southern Legal Counsel, the Florida Health Justice Project and the National Health Law Program called the move “medically and scientifically unsound” and said it was politically motivated.

• “This rule represents a dangerous escalation in Governor DeSantis’s political zeal to persecute LGBTQ+ people in Florida, and particularly transgender youth,” the groups wroe.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) earlier this month suspended Andrew Warren, an elected state attorney in Tampa, after Warren said he would not prosecute people who receive abortions or gender-affirming medical care in Florida. The governor said Warren was a supporter of “disfiguring young kids.”