Last week the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals became the first federal appellate court to uphold a state ban on Medicaid coverage for so-called gender affirming surgeries
This case, Anderson v. Crouch, came out of West Virginia, and it ultimately means that taxpayers in West Virginia will not be forced to foot the bill for these procedures. A press release from the state’s attorney general office affirms the state’s authority “to prioritize taxpayer funds for proven, essential medical care.”
Talking about this on “Washington Watch,” Attorney General John "JB" McCuskey (R-West Virginia) said that common sense is starting to prevail throughout the judiciary and U.S. culture.
"What West Virginia did was a really common sense law that said 'we're not going to use our taxpayer money to pay for these elective gender reassignment surgeries,' and when that happened, there was a lawsuit filed against our department of Health and Human Services,” McCuskey states.
McCuskey say this case has been pending for years. The plaintiffs claim, he explains, that the law declaring taxpayer money will not be used to pay for the procedures violated the Equal Protection Clause and several other constitutional provisions.
“But the 4th Circuit rightly decided that this law applies equally to biological men as it does to biological women," McCuskey states.
That, he says, is important. The ideology of the plaintiffs believed the law was targeting a specific group of people and restricting their access to “sex change” surgery.
"The 4th Circuit rightly said that that isn’t true, and that in West Virginia biological men have the same access to care as biological females, and that this is not the kind of procedure that the government should be forced to be paying for using taxpayer dollars."
Therefore, the exclusion to these procedures is not based on sex or transgender status but actually because of medical diagnosis, and this applies to all Medicaid recipients.
McCuskey is "very grateful" for the 4th Circuit's decision.
"We're hopeful that other circuit courts around the country will come to the same conclusion," McCuskey says.
Similar court decisions dismantling the transgender stronghold on the nation comes from the recent Supreme Court case Mirabelli v. Bonta. The “historic and groundbreaking ruling,” reports the Liberty Justice Center, found that California’s “secret gender transition policies in schools violate the religious liberty and due process rights of parents,” making a significant ruling for parental rights.
This decision comes after a recent crackdown from the U.S. Department of Health and Humans Services (HHS) to end gender mutilation surgeries on minors, which follows after President Donald Trump’s similar executive order.
