Insurance Fraud in Transgender Medicine

A common practice unfolds in the field of gender medicine: diagnosing patients seeking to transition with “Endocrine Disorder Not Otherwise Specified” even when they don’t have endocrine disorders, rather than diagnosing them with “Gender Identity Disorders.”

There are three reasons this potential billing fraud is happening, Leor Sapir writes. It’s a response “to Obama-era regulations that required the collection of data on sexual orientation and gender identity in electronic health records; to pressures from transgender-identified patients and their advocates to reduce the stigma associated with ‘gender identity disorder’ diagnoses; and to an insurance landscape in which reimbursement claims for hormones or surgeries were not always fulfilled,” he explains.

It remains to be seen whether providers will be held liable for using inappropriate diagnostic codes, but identifying and prosecuting insurance fraud is a key part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on gender medicine.

Read Sapir’s extensive analysis.

In what was presented as a moderate protest against President Trump, thousands of New Yorkers participated in “No Kings Day” earlier this month. But radical groups like the Communist Party of the United States, the New York Young Communist League, and the Freedom Socialist Party cosponsored the event, making a stark contrast with other No Kings supporters like the Manhattan Young Democrats.

It’s “just one example of a broader phenomenon: far-left groups using the anti-Trump moment to try to infiltrate the mainstream,” Stu Smith writes. “As the radicals evolve their tactics, the messaging changes, but the goal remains clear: to stay at the forefront of resistance and draw more moderates to the fringes.”

Read his analysis.

Michael Bloomberg was New York’s last Republican mayor, elected in the aftermath of September 11. He won that race by two points, with the Independence Party accounting for 4 percent of his vote. Similarly, Fiorello La Guardia, John Lindsay, and Rudy Giuliani all won thanks to support from a strong minor party. Indeed, history shows that Republicans win in New York City only when they’ve built substantial coalitions beyond their party’s base.

Curtis Sliwa, however, “is running as a partisan Republican, not as a centrist looking to attract the votes of a wide swath of New Yorkers,” Christian Browne writes. “The consistent polling results indicate that Sliwa has not crafted a fusion coalition that can lead to victory.”

Read his take.

This fall, the College Board discontinued usage of its “Landscape” tool, which allowed college admissions departments to gather “socioeconomic” data about applicants’ high schools and neighborhoods. The data appeared to be color-blind, but they “were carefully primed to flag black applicants and other favored demographics,” Wai Wah Chin writes.

Racial preferences in admissions have been illegal since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action two years ago. But schools’ efforts to skirt the ban will undoubtedly continue. Without the College Board’s tool, “universities will likely devise another socioeconomic race-proxy scheme,” Chin maintains. “These efforts should be named for what they almost always are: thinly veiled pretexts for racial discrimination.”

“Too many of America’s big cities are in bad shape. I live in Los Angeles, and I know many friends and family who moved from L.A. from 2020–2023 to the suburbs or other states and who have not returned. The rose is off the bloom for many of our big cities, and, because of Democratic policies and ideology in those cities, I don’t see the state of affairs changing soon.”

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