Culture and Social Issues

JD Vance Seeks Criminal Investigation Into Hospitals Doing Child Sex Changes, Citing Evidence Of Fraud

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Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday that he had reported a host of children’s health providers for criminal investigation, citing a new government report alleging their pediatric gender programs exploited children to perpetrate massive fraud.

Health providers disguised pricey sex change surgeries and cross-sex hormones with anodyne diagnoses like “endocrine disorder, unspecified,” to bill insurance companies and the federal government, the report from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) alleges.

Vance identified two motivations: Ideology and money.

“For years now, some hospitals and healthcare providers have been subjecting children to horrific, experimental treatments in service of radical gender ideologies,” Vance wrote in a Thursday X post. “More than just pushing these procedures on kids, hospitals and providers may have been defrauding Medicaid and private insurers by using misleading or fraudulent billing codes to get insurance to cover the costs.”

The report — titled “Wolves In White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of ‘Gender Medicine'” — lays out evidence that hospitals systematically misdiagnosed minors to bill private insurers and the federal government for breast removal surgeries, cross-sex hormone therapy, and other unproven treatments.

More than 225 hospitals and health systems established gender clinics, the report found. The providers could face serious criminal and civil liability, the report states.

How could hospitals continue to embrace experimental procedures on children even as evidence accumulated that they had no basis in medical science and could cause lifelong harm? Hospitals rigorously evaluate whether to embrace novel medical procedures all the time, and states like Texas have passed laws banning these practices.

“That’s the question we began with and to our surprise, we didn’t expect to find this, but one of the major things that we found is that it was fraudulent diagnostic codes facilitating this,” coauthor Aaron Kheriaty, director of the Bioethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Hospital administrators were willing to embrace and disguise pseudoscientific practices for larger revenues, Kheriaty said.

Former Assistant Secretary for Health of the HHS Rachel Levine pushed “so-called gender-affirming care for minors, and there’s nothing caring about that,” said Levine’s successor Admiral Brian Christine in an announcement alongside Vance and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “These are sex-rejecting, mutilating transgender procedures.”

The report reveals the dual fraud of pediatric gender programs: Fraudulent billing is used to perpetuate a fraudulent medical discipline built on junk science, coauthor Neeraja Deshpande, a policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, told the DCNF.

“This isn’t just ‘Learing Center’ fraud, although I do think that hurts the social fabric, and I don’t want to undercut that. But this sort of fraud involves mutilating kids,” Deshpande said. “It undermines faith in the entire medical system.”

The report also cites a January DCNF report revealing that Pennsylvania Department of Human Services data showed a more than 2100% increase in reimbursement for puberty blocker claims using the “precocious puberty” diagnosis between 2013 to 2017.

Clinical practices promoted by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) as the standard of care for children with gender dysphoria lack a high-quality scientific evidence base, according to systematic reviews in Europe. A Johns Hopkins University systematic review of hormonal and surgical interventions in minors conducted in collaboration with WPATH concluded the evidence for gender interventions in minors to be very low quality, but the organization’s officials suppressed the university’s findings. Leaked documents from the group revealed in 2024 that members knew children could not consent to permanent side effects like sexual dysfunction and lifetime infertility.

Pediatrics is typically a low-earning specialty for doctors. Most children who land in the emergency room recover, and fewer children suffer from chronic diseases that require routine visits to the doctor and medication. A 2015 study examining data between 2008 and 2013 found 82% of pediatric patients had no chronic conditions.

However, a child diagnosed with gender dysphoria steps onto a conveyor belt of endocrinology visits, hormone level tests, bone density scans, liver function monitoring, therapy, and surgical procedures, the report points out.