Healthcare providers may be able to misrepresent transgender treatments for minors as routine care that is unrelated to gender-affirming treatments, a new report from medical watchdog Do No Harm revealed.
Chief medical officer at Do No Harm Dr. Kurt Miceli told The Center Square: “We suspect there are healthcare providers doing exactly what our report exposes: skirting coding rules to get paid for child sex changes.”
“Our report details how providers could potentially bypass coding guidelines and identifies eight likely diagnostic codes they would use,” Miceli said.
“To frame gender dysphoria as an endocrine disorder, for example, is simply wrong,” Miceli said.
“It undermines medical integrity, distorts diagnostic accuracy, and erodes public trust in how healthcare claims are coded and paid for – all of this before even considering the harms these experimental interventions inflict on vulnerable, gender-confused children,” Miceli said.
“Oversight is needed for providers who disregard systematic reviews showing very low evidence of benefit for these interventions and then sidestep coding rules to ensure they are reimbursed,” he said.
Do No Harm’s report revealed eight codes that may be used to misrepresent gender treatments for minors.
These codes are hypopituitarism, other primary ovarian failure, testicular hypofunction, precocious puberty, other specified endocrine disorders, endocrine disorder, unspecified, hormone replacement therapy, and hypertrophy of breast.
Do No Harm’s report stated that “there is significant evidence showing that many of the organizations involved in the child transgender industry have (at the very least) promoted alternative billing practices to secure insurance reimbursement.”
A press release from Do No Harm said that “by hiding transgender procedures behind codes meant for other conditions, providers are – at minimum – skirting guidelines and ethical standards.”
