{"id":1537180,"date":"2024-03-05T20:35:10","date_gmt":"2024-03-05T20:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=462688"},"modified":"2024-03-05T20:35:10","modified_gmt":"2024-03-05T20:35:10","slug":"florida-anti-trans-bill-could-raise-everyones-health-insurance-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/03\/05\/florida-anti-trans-bill-could-raise-everyones-health-insurance-costs\/","title":{"rendered":"Florida Anti-Trans Bill Could Raise Everyone\u2019s Health Insurance Costs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n \"LGBTQ\n
\n LGBTQ+ rights supporters protest against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Nov. 6, 2022, in Fort Myers, Fla. <\/span>\n Photo: Giorgio Viera\/AFP via Getty Images<\/span>\n <\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Republican-led<\/u> Florida House last week passed<\/a> some of the most extreme anti-trans legislation to move through the far-right chamber to date. Media attention<\/a> focused on a measure that would ban trans people from carrying accurate driver\u2019s licenses by requiring state IDs to list only the gender assigned to a person at birth. The proposal has been dubbed the \u201ctrans erasure bill.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That same piece of legislation, House Bill 1639<\/a>, would also mandate a series of pernicious measures relating to private health insurance coverage. These aspects of the proposed law have garnered fewer headlines, but the impact could be far-reaching: They risk raising the cost of health insurance for everyone in the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Cisgender people are not the key concern here. The anti-trans legislation is most vile, of course, for its explicit intent to render public life and necessary health care ever more inaccessible for trans people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Control over gender-nonconforming people requires control over everyone.<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Yet the fact that a Republican agenda for trans erasure means doing damage to the wider health care system is a reminder that control over gender-nonconforming people requires control<\/a> over everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trans erasure bill mandates that all private health insurance plans, for every Floridian, cover what is commonly described as \u201cconversion therapy\u201d \u2014 a dangerous pseudoscientific approach to changing someone\u2019s sexual preferences or gender identity. The bill doesn\u2019t call it that, of course, but with a little translation of the obfuscating language and poor grammar, it\u2019s easy to show what Florida Republicans are trying to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The bill \u201cforbids health insurers and HMOs from prohibiting coverage of mental health and therapeutic services to treat a person\u2019s perception that his or her sex is inconsistent with sex at birth by affirming the person\u2019s sex at birth.\u201d That is, health insurers must cover therapy that insists that a gender assigned at birth is correct, and that a person suffering from gender dysphoria should be made to accept this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conversion therapy is a debunked practice, banned in 2020 states and rejected<\/a> by the American Medical Association. Yet, should the trans erasure bill become law, Florida residents under private health insurance plans will have to pay for it to be covered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[pullqutote pull=left]\u201cFor every anti-LGBTQ bill we see pass in Florida, we\u2019ll see it taken up elsewhere.\u201d[\/pullquote]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Florida has been ground zero for introducing a spate of anti-trans legislation<\/a> aiming at health insurance and medical liability as a means to bring about de facto<\/a> health care bans for trans adults, alongside explicit bans on care for trans youth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so important we stop these bills in Florida,\u201d Carlos Guillermo Smith, a senior policy adviser for Equality Florida who is running for state Senate, told me. \u201cFor every anti-LGBTQ bill we see pass in Florida, we\u2019ll see it taken up elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not clear,<\/u> and has not been calculated<\/a>, what the exact cost of the \u201cconversion therapy\u201d mandate would be for privately insured Floridians. No research was carried out by Republicans on the financial consequences of the measure, despite such analysis being required by state law before any mandate on health insurance is enacted. Florida Republicans, though, might not know that: They\u2019re usually fighting tooth and nail against enacting these mandates, which in most cases have been proposed to expand access to health care, not restrict it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This grim irony \u2014 that the Florida GOP usually opposes government mandates on health care coverage provisions but is in this case seeking to impose its own in the name of conversion therapy \u2014 is not lost on LGBTQ+ and health care advocates in the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey\u2019ve taken their culture-war attacks against trans people so far that it\u2019s costing everyone,\u201d said Smith. \u201cIf the human price wasn\u2019t bad enough \u2014 and it should be \u2014 it\u2019s hitting all our pockets,\u201d he told me, noting that Florida is one of \u201ca handful of remaining states\u201d that has refused<\/a> to expand Medicaid, in turn denying coverage to 800,000 uninsured Floridians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a series<\/a> of tweets, Smith cited Florida\u2019s own law, which states that the legislature \u201crecognizes that most mandated benefits contribute to the increasing cost of health insurance premiums.\u201d Nonetheless, he noted, \u201cHB 1639 mandates anti-trans \u2018conversion therapy\u2019 on all health care plans no matter what the cost on Floridians.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf the human price wasn\u2019t bad enough \u2014 and it should be \u2014 it\u2019s hitting all our pockets.”<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no real contradiction here. Republicans have long combined costly totalitarian bureaucracy<\/a> and law enforcement<\/a> with vicious austerity<\/a> measures in service of their ultimate goals: white supremacy, Christo-nationalism, and property protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer to the conversion therapy mandate is not to call upon Republicans to remain consistent in their austerity logics and resist all government mandated health care. Rather, it\u2019s to fight for a robust system of free health care for all, less vulnerable to the compulsions of conservative minority rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other measures in<\/u> the trans erasure bill take specific aim at insurance plans that cover gender-affirming care and require that coverage for \u201cde-transition\u201d medical treatment be offered for any such plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDe-transition\u201d care should already be covered as<\/em> gender affirming health care \u2014 to transition again is still to transition \u2014 but the legislation is an invitation for private insurers to treat trans people as a site of risk and raise premiums accordingly or drop gender-affirming care coverage altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bill explicitly states that plans that cover trans health care can charge \u201can appropriate additional premium,\u201d singling out trans people for higher premiums to cover the care they need. Meanwhile, all Floridians would have to pay more for the inclusion of conversion therapy in their coverage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having passed the House last week, the Florida Senate now has until the end of the week \u2014 the close of the legislative session \u2014 to take up the trans erasure bill and other anti-trans legislation passed by the House. If the Senate responds to rightful public concern about the legislation and does not pick it up in the coming days, the bill dies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would be a small but necessary victory against the Republican war on trans existence.<\/p>\n

The post Florida Anti-Trans Bill Could Raise Everyone\u2019s Health Insurance Costs<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Florida GOP’s so-called trans erasure bill mandates that insurance companies cover widely debunked “conversion therapy.”<\/p>\n

The post Florida Anti-Trans Bill Could Raise Everyone\u2019s Health Insurance Costs<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1764,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,6145,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1764"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1537180"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1537181,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537180\/revisions\/1537181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1537180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1537180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1537180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}