11 Senate Democrats Call on the Trump Administration to Stop Getting Between Doctors and Families
Washington, D.C. – Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore. and Senator Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., led nine Senate Democrats in calling for the Trump administration to withdraw two proposed regulations that would place unprecedented restrictions on health care providers, like hospitals, for providing treatment for gender dysphoria to young Americans. The rules would restrict health care providers from participating in the Medicare and Medicaid programs if they provide this life-saving care, forcing hospitals to make an impossible choice or risk being cut out of the health care system.
“This policy would mark an unprecedented intrusion of partisan politics and ideology into medical decision-making and severely restrict access to evidence-based, medically-necessary care,” the senators wrote. “This proposed rule would place the federal government directly between physicians, patients, and families by conditioning hospital participation in Medicare and Medicaid on the denial of individualized, clinician-directed care. The conditions of participation (CoPs) for hospitals have never before been used to compel providers to disregard their medical judgment or prevent patients from receiving care that clinicians, in consultation with patients and parents, determine to be medically appropriate.”
The letters, sent to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz, offered detailed comments on the proposed regulations. The first letter made clear that using conditions of participation to restrict specific types of medical care, which do not align with the administration’s extreme ideology, would violate guardrails put in place by Congress that prevent the federal government from dictating to medical professionals the type of care hospitals can or cannot provide. The second explained how the proposal violated core Medicaid statutory requirements by denying medically-necessary care and substituting federal ideology for clinician judgment.
Wyden and Markey were joined by U.S. Senators Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., Brian Schatz, D-Hawai’i, Patty Murray, D-Wash., Mazie Hirono, D-Hawai’i, Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Tina Smith, D-Minn., and Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill.
Wyden previously highlighted the Trump administration’s continued attacks and erasure of transgender Americans. He has also raised the alarm about attempts by the Administration to bully hospitals into providing private medical information about transgender Americans to the federal government.
The full letters can be found here.
A web version of this release is here.
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