First on FOX: Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sued the Biden administration over a new “radical mandate” that would require health care providers to perform transgender surgical procedures — including on children — while forcing the state to pay.
“Joe Biden has once again exceeded his legal authority to force a radical transgender ideology on the American people. His administration is threatening to hold hostage federal funding from health care providers who refuse to perform or insist on dangerous and irreversible transgender procedures,” Bailey said in a statement first taken by Fox News Digital.
Bailey said she filed a lawsuit with the American College of Pediatricians and the attorneys general of Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota and Utah to prevent “untouchable federal bureaucrats from forcing Missouri health care providers to perform experimental gender transition procedures.” taxpayers.
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“Doctors should not be forced to harm children,” the lawsuit says.
In April, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) updated the rules in Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that stipulates nondiscrimination “on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in certain health programs and activities .” These protections extend to health programs or services that receive federal funding.
The newly finalized Section 1557 also redefines “by sex” to include “gender identity” and “termination of pregnancy.”
“We clarify that the Nondiscrimination Policy prohibits sex discrimination including protections provided for various types of sex discrimination such as pregnancy, including termination of pregnancy or related conditions, and we have modified the parentheses in § 92.8(b) to clarify that the reference to this provision. to sex discrimination corresponds to the various types of sex discrimination described in § 92.101(a)(2), which include ‘gender identity,'” that rule.
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The lawsuit says the rule “threatens to punish doctors and states that don’t comply with the mandate by imposing large financial penalties and exclusion from federally funded health programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).”
“This penalty will prevent doctors and the state from effectively providing health care to the most vulnerable children in low-income communities,” the lawsuit said.
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The new rules claim to implement the ban on sex discrimination in ACA section 1557, but neither that law nor its precursor, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, mandates gender transition procedures, Bailey argued.
The lawsuit also argues the new rules violate the ACA and the Administrative Procedure Act and undermine free speech. In addition, neither the rule nor the ACA provides for clear notification or agreement by states and health care providers regarding the funding or provision of gender transition care through the federal insurance program.
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The claim is much more conservative country create laws that severely restrict surgical and non-surgical transgender procedures for minors. In addition, states like Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Alabama and Florida have taken it a step further by making it a crime to prescribe a gender transition or perform a surgical procedure, such as sex reassignment.
Meanwhile, several states have created “shield laws” that protect the procedure and gender transition prescriptions for transgender people, including California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, New York, Vermont, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Maryland , Illinois and Massachusetts.
Fox News Digital has reached out to HHS for comment.
Kendall Tietz of Fox News Digital contributed to this report.