In my article on HuffingtonPost, ’I Am Cait’: Loving Someone Who Is Transgender, Anna talked about the difficulty her transmale partner faces trying to obtain and pay for medical care. She said the most difficult part is watching her partner go through the “…the intrinsic bias of a medical field, government, and social climate that doesn’t understand or accept transgenderism.”
Hopefully the first two, medical field and government, are changing. Obama’s administration is pushing to ban discrimination of transgender people by medical insurance companies (HuffingtonPost).
Currently many insurance companies don’t cover medical care related to transition including mental health care, hormones, and surgeries. That means even when a transgender person is able to obtain a job with health insurance benefits, their transition and post-transition care may not be covered. Medical costs associated with transgender care over a lifetime can exceed $30,000. When you consider that many transgender people are unemployed or underemployed due to discrimination, paying out of pocket for their transition related care can feel impossible. Requiring insurance companies to cover transgender related care or face hefty fines for discrimination would lift a huge burden from the shoulders of struggling transgender people across the nation.
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