by Kate Anderson and Mary Lou Masters
The state of Nevada paid $12.5 million for transgender medical services and procedures over the past eight years, according to documents obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Nevada Department of Health and Human Services provided data to the Daily Caller News Foundation showing that from January 2015 to May 2023, the state paid $12,572,974 for transgender medical procedures, therapy and treatments through Medicaid and Nevada Check Up (NCU). The payments were for insurance claims tagged with “Gender Identity” and national drug codes, as well as for claims tagged with procedure codes related to transgender care, including surgeries, infertility, counseling and speech therapy, according to the documents.
The payments steadily increased by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, going from $514,548 in 2015 to $1,142,131 two years later; by 2021, the state paid $2,244,951 for claims, according to the documents.
The number of Americans getting transgender medical procedures has skyrocketed over the last several years, with one study revealing that sex change surgeries for patients aged 12 to 40 jumped from 4,552 in 2016 to 13,011 in 2019.
Nevada paid $2,116 for speech therapy with a gender dysphoria insurance code from 2015 to 2019, according to the documents. For counseling services with gender dysphoria codes, the state paid $17,422 in 2015 and by 2022 it had covered $350,375 worth of state insurance claims.
The documents also separated claims for patients 18 years old and under into its own category, showing that from 2015 to 2023 the state paid $4,465,754 toward transgender procedures for patients 18 and under. In 2015, the state paid $291,428 for patients 18 and under, increasing in 2021 to $714,795.
A recent study found that the number of teens getting transgender surgeries has also drastically increased since 2016, with 3,678 teens receiving either genital restructuring, facial, breast or chest surgeries.
Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo signed a bill into law in June that required health insurance providers, including Medicaid, to pay for all “medically necessary” transgender surgeries, according to The Nevada Independent. The law requires insurance companies to “prescribe requirements that must be satisfied before the insurer will cover surgical treatment for conditions relating to gender dysphoria or gender incongruence for persons who are less than 18 years of age.”
Proponents of the bill argued that a mastectomy for a transgender man was just as necessary as a mastectomy for a woman, according to The Nevada Independent.
“The goal of the bill is to stop insurance companies from discriminating against people based on their gender or their gender identity,” Democratic state Sen. Melanie Scheible, the author of the bill, said.
Opponents of the bill argued that the state should be allowed to use taxpayer dollars to pay for transgender medical procedures that would “fund anti-scientific, barbaric practices that result in permanent damage to children,” according to The Nevada Independent.
“Democrat priorities—they won’t bring forward a bill to cover cancer treatment or infertility care, but they fight for genital mutilation of children paid for by the state,” the Nevada GOP wrote in a post on X.
The Nevada Department of Health and Human Services, Scheible and the Nevada GOP did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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Kate Anderson and Mary Lou Masters are reporters at Daily Caller News Foundation.
