Dr. Eithan Haim, the surgeon who exposed Texas Children’s Hospital’s secretive transgender procedures on minors, warned lawmakers during a Wednesday hearing about a trend involving health-care providers fraudulently billing insurance companies for gender transition surgeries.
During the House Judiciary Committee hearing, Representative Brandon Gill (R., Texas) asked Haim about a fact sheet from the Campaign for Southern Equality, an LGBTQ nonprofit, instructing medical providers on which insurance codes to use for diagnoses and treatments related to what activists call “gender affirming care.”
The document identifies the ICD-10 insurance code corresponding with gender dysphoria or, more broadly, gender identity disorders as an example that insurance companies commonly reject. It lists numerous alternative codes that are commonly accepted, which Haim explained are used to allow transgender procedures to fly under the radar of insurance providers.
“What this document does is inform doctors at these clinics how to get insurance companies, whether private or government, to cover interventions without revealing that it’s being used for gender dysphoria,” Haim testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government.
The general surgeon then said if a physician wants to perform a mastectomy on a girl and “not raise any red flags,” they could label it a breast reduction surgery. A mastectomy fully removes, rather than reduces, breast tissue.
Or if a physician prescribes testosterone to a girl through hormone therapy, they could say they’re diagnosing testosterone deficiency for a male patient.
