JD Vance Demands That The DOJ Investigate Hospitals Caring for Transgender Patients

This story originally appeared on The Advocate.Vice President JD Vance just suggested the Trump administration has not yet gone far enough in limiting access to gender-affirming care.The Republican urged the Justice Department on Thursday to investigate allegations that medical institutions improperly billed insurers for gender-affirming care provided to transgender patients. Vance sent a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, according to POLITICO, asking him to investigate dozens of hospitals and forwarding findings from a Health and Human Services report issued earlier that day alleging potential fraud.“Some pediatric gender clinics and children’s hospitals have apparently used misleading or even fraudulent diagnostic and billing codes to ensure that insurance companies will cover the procedures,” Vance wrote.The HHS report was titled “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of ‘Gender Medicine.’”Related: JD Vance rages about ‘radical gender ideology’ while white supremacists march along National Mall Vance heads the White House’s Anti-Fraud Task Force and cast the demand as an exercise in eliminating improper Medicaid claims. But it also fits into the administration’s sweeping campaign against transgender Americans’ access to health care across the country.President Donald Trump just this week issued an executive order barring Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program funds from being used for gender-affirming care. Any claims cited in the HHS report issued the same week would have preceded that order.The report focused heavily on hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, alleging that some used improper billing practices to secure insurance coverage for the services. It describes many transgender youth receiving care as “captive patients” and alleges that current billing practices allowed hospitals to develop revenue streams for “sex-rejecting procedures.”The report