Thing That Never Happens Has Happened At Least $135 Million Times At Taxpayer Expense

We were charged big bucks to hurt the kids while they said it wasn't happening

A Congressional Budget Office analysis of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program has found that taxpayers spent at least $135 million on transgender medicalization, including surgeries, on minors from 2019 to 2023.

Benjamin Ryan reports at The New York Sun that “combined CHIP and Medicaid spending on gender-transition interventions for minors increased from $17.2 million in 2019 to $34.1 million in 2023; the bulk of the spending went to puberty blockers, which are extraordinarily expensive.”

The study found 80,546 young people receiving this ‘care’ through a search of diagnostic and procedure codes that are approved for that purpose. As regular readers of The Distance will be aware, it is also very common for clinicians to use false medical billing codes for young patients, so this is still an undercount of the affected population.

That’s important to bear in mind because the new numbers are much higher than the ‘floor’ estimates produced by Stop The Harm in 2024. In prepa…