New York to Require Insurers to Cover Transgender Healthcare

What a week for transgender New Yorkers!

Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued guidance today to health insurance companies that they are barred from discriminating against transgender individuals by denying them medically necessary treatment.

This news comes just days after the New York City Council passed a bill that made it easier for transgender New Yorkers to correct the sex designation on their birth certificates to reflect who they are.

Know Your Rights: Transgender, a legal guide for trans people and advocates.

We applaud the state of New York for making it clear that insurance companies can no longer deny transgender individuals the medical and mental health care that is routinely provided to non-transgender policy holders. This is life-saving news for many transgender New Yorkers. New York is the tenth jurisdiction to require transgender medical services joining California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Washington, D.C., Last June, Lambda Legal and other organizations also worked with the Cuomo administration to change the New York State policy to eliminate the surgery requirement for transgender people seeking to change the sex designation on their birth certificates.

Transition-related health care can be medically necessary.  The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health have confirmed this, and courts have affirmed their conclusion. We are glad that a growing number of states are addressing the widespread discriminatory practice of excluding this type of health care in insurance plans. In 2013, Lambda Legal successfully filed a lawsuit against the state of Oregon on behalf of Alec Esquivel, a transgender Oregon public employee who was denied coverage for a medically necessary procedure that would have been covered for non-transgender employees.

These steps are significant, but the progress is incremental at best and transgender people continue to face significant barriers to accessing medical services. To date only five jurisdictions have extended Medicaid coverage to transition-related medical services.  Given that most transgender people face high rates of poverty, we urge New York to continue taking strides to grant transgender people access to health care and remove the discriminatory exclusion of transgender health care from its Medicaid program.

If transgender New Yorkers have trouble getting medical care on an equal basis they could contact our help desk at 212-809-8585 x 235 or visit http://www.lambdalegal.org/help.

We remain encouraged by recent progress, but we are also well aware that much remains to be done. Lambda Legal will continue to look for opportunities to expand health care access for transgender people through both policy work and impact litigation because lives depend on it.

Read the press release.