JD Vance demands that the DOJ investigate hospitals caring for transgender patients

Vice President JD Vance just suggested the Trump administration has not yet gone far enough in limiting access to gender-affirming care.

The Republican urged the Justice Department on Thursday to investigate allegations that medical institutions improperly billed insurers for gender-affirming care provided to transgender patients. Vance sent a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, according to POLITICO, asking him to investigate dozens of hospitals and forwarding findings from a Health and Human Services report issued earlier that day alleging potential fraud.

“Some pediatric gender clinics and children’s hospitals have apparently used misleading or even fraudulent diagnostic and billing codes to ensure that insurance companies will cover the procedures,” Vance wrote.

The HHS report was titled “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of ‘Gender Medicine.’”

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Vance heads the White House’s Anti-Fraud Task Force and cast the demand as an exercise in eliminating improper Medicaid claims. But it also fits into the administration’s sweeping campaign against transgender Americans’ access to health care across the country.

President Donald Trump just this week issued an executive order barring Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program funds from being used for gender-affirming care. Any claims cited in the HHS report issued the same week would have preceded that order.

The report focused heavily on hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, alleging that some used improper billing practices to secure insurance coverage for the services. It describes many transgender youth receiving care as “captive patients” and alleges that current billing practices allowed hospitals to develop revenue streams for “sex-rejecting procedures.”

The report also accused LGBTQ+ advocates, particularly the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), of encouraging hospitals to use vague or fraudulent billing codes to obtain insurance coverage for procedures.

“When a child is in distress, many parents will go to any length to find help and to relieve the pain. These parents count on America’s pediatric hospitals, medical associations, and federal regulatory agencies to value science over ideology and people over profit when recommending medical procedures,” the report claimed. “Instead, parents encountered wolves in white lab coats who pushed vulnerable children down a path towards irreversible harm from sex-rejecting procedures.”

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Gender-affirming care has been supported by all major medical associations for adults and minors who are under the care of qualified physicians. The American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics are among them. WPATH has not responded directly to the HHS report, but last year it said the federal agency had intentionally misrepresented its research and recommendations.

“Clinical practice guidelines, including WPATH’s Standards of Care Version 8 (SOC8), are developed through evaluation of evidence, clinical expertise, patient values and preferences, and cultural and contextual considerations. SOC8 emphasizes ongoing research into outcomes for transgender youth while advocating for developmentally appropriate clinical services, read a release. “Efforts to halt research funding and ban gender-affirming interventions threaten the health and dignity of transgender individuals and hinder medical progress.”

The Human Rights Campaign also condemned the report, accusing HHS of assembling a panel of anti-transgender activists and relying on research from anti-transgender advocacy groups. “You cannot hand-pick a panel of anti-transgender activists, feed it research from anti-trans advocacy organizations, publish the result under an HHS banner, and call that independent science,” HRC President Kelley Robinson said. “We can’t lose sight of the fact that this obsessive and meritless campaign against transition care for youth is causing real harm — real people, families, and their children are suffering at the hands of their own government.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics criticized Vance’s request as another attempt by the administration to interfere in medical practice and impose its ideological agenda.

“Allowing the government to determine which patient groups deserve care sets a dangerous precedent, and children and families will bear the consequences,” AAP President Susan J. Kressly said in a statement reported by POLITICO.