Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea J. Campbell announced yesterday that she is joining 17 other state attorneys general across the US in an effort to reverse a Trump-era elimination of nondiscrimination protections for transgender people from the Affordable Care Act.
“In light of the unprecedented attacks on health care access from state legislatures across this country — including attacks on gender affirming care, birthing people, and immigrants — it is critically important that we expand access to health care, not eliminate the anti-discrimination protections relied on by so many,” Campbell announced in her statement. “I am proud to co-lead this multistate effort to stop this discriminatory rule and help ensure health care access for all.”
Mass.Live.com goes on to report:
The March 26 amicus brief filed in support of Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Youth, et al. v. United States Department of Health and Human Services, backs the effort to reverse a 2020 rule by the former Trump administration that stripped nondiscrimination protections for transgender people and other vulnerable populations from the healthcare law.
In addition to dramatically narrowing the nondiscrimination language, the final version of the administration’s regulation also adopted “blanket abortion and religious freedom exemptions for health care providers,” and it reduced “protections that provide access to interpretation and translation services for individuals with limited English proficiency,” according to an analysis by KFF.org.
At the time, the Trump administration argued that it was reversing “overreach” by the former Obama administration, and said its action would return the definition of gender discrimination “to the plain meaning of those terms, which is based on biological sex,” NPR reported at the time, citing a former Trump White House official.
Critics argued that the rule, imposed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and historic civil rights demonstrations, would compound harms on an already vulnerable population of Americans.
“I can’t help but wonder if the timing [of this rule] is by design so that this is something that people won’t pay attention to,” Tia Sherèe Gaynor, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati, told NPR.
Read the complete MassLive.com story here.
Not a subscriber? Sign up today for a free subscription to Boston Spirit magazine, New England’s premier LGBT magazine. We will send you a copy of Boston Spirit 6 times per year and we never sell/rent our subscriber information. Click HERE to sign up!
