What a perfect way to kick off 2014, right.
Christian News reports:
The Connecticut Insurance Department has directed all insurance companies in the state to provide coverage for sex change operations, treatments and counseling, reports state.
The Hartford Courant outlines that the department recently issued a bulletin to insurance companies throughout Connecticut, advising them to ensure that “individuals with gender dysphoria … are not denied access to medically necessary care because of the individual’s gender identity or gender expression.”
Gender dysphoria is defined as “the condition of feeling one’s emotional and psychological identity as male or female to be opposite to one’s biological sex” and is listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The bulletin distributed to insurance companies noted the APA’s acknowledgment of the condition and its consequential eligibility for coverage. It also pointed to a 2011 state law barring discrimination based on gender identity.
“Under these statutes, health insurers are required to pay ‘covered expenses’ for treatment provided to individuals with gender dysphoria where the treatment is deemed necessary under generally accepted medical standards,” it stated.
Connecticut Insurance Commmissioner Anne Melissa Dowling told the Courant that she wanted to start off 2014 by ensuring that the coverage was in place.
“As we were turning the corner into the new year, we just wanted to make sure every constituency was clearly heard,” she stated.
I’m thinking that 2014 will be an even worse year for religious liberty than 2013 was. I know, Happy New Year.
January 1, 2014 at 5:28 pm
It's a bizarre move and one CT folks should protest, but it doesn't come close to the HHS mandate — which is federal, not state, and which covers common procedures and drugs that there is no reason for it to cover. While all insurance policies in the state will have to cover this, the number of people who will use that coverage is very small, and most employers know that it will never be used. That doesn't make it any less odious, but does indicate that it's mostly a symbolic move made to "preserve equity" or some similarly progressive goal. The ACA on the other hand requires employers to provide coverage to a large number of people, so most employers know that it WILL be used, and it's far from being mostly symbolic.
January 1, 2014 at 5:44 pm
I have financial dysphoria. Will the state treasurer kindly arrange for me to be more comfortable with my financial dysphoria by counseling my debt collectors and abolishing my bills. Gender is not a disease, but the HHS Mandate is tyranny passed AFTER the ACA was passed and not given review by Congress or the will of the people. Informed consent of the people was never intended by Obamacare. Totalitarianism in the finest sense of the word. SWINDLE
January 1, 2014 at 7:36 pm
Insurers may leave Connecticut as people move there to get sex change surgery, which is very expensive. This is nuts.
January 1, 2014 at 8:08 pm
As Smeryakov says in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, if there is no God, then all is permitted. To such as Ms. and / or Dr. Dowling, there is no god but her feelings and moods and whims, and so any horror is not only acceptable but must be forced upon the innocent. And to think that her first name is Anne.
January 2, 2014 at 8:10 am
Its totally a new and different thing for me.
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