(IntegrityTimes.com) – Last year the Texas state legislature passed a law banning so-called gender-affirming care for minors and as well as legislation to bar taxpayer funds from being used to fund it at any age.
The prohibition against providing any “sex change” medical treatments for minors in Texas went into effect on September 1, 2023. However, another whistleblower has come forward asserting that the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston has not only continued to do so, but they are also fraudulently billing Medicare for it.
Vanessa Sivadge works as a registered nurse for the Texas Children’s Hospital. She claims that just days after Texas Children’s CEO Mark Wallace claimed that they were shutting down their child gender clinic the hospital secretly reopened it. The hospital was prescribing puberty blockers, implanting hormone devices, making specialized gender change referrals, and even performing surgeries. When she was originally hired to work there, Sivadge gradually became convinced that instead of helping their young patients, the hospital was actively harming them.
After reading an exposé about the Texas Children’s gender-change program by Christopher Rufo, Sivadge reached out to him to add her own testimony. Shortly after she had done so, she was visited by two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Sivadge says the agents informed her she was a “person of interest”, claimed she had broken federal privacy laws, and threatened to make life very difficult for her. They also hinted that she was not safe at her workplace as her name had been given to them by someone there. After the terrifying visit by the FBI, Sivadge noticed discrepancies in some of the paperwork for some of the trans-identified patients.
Texas Medicaid officials say that coverage of all gender affirming health services is prohibited, not just the surgeries. However, Sivadge noted that Dr. Richard Ogden Roberts and Dr. David Paul still had many patients still receiving sex change medical treatments. Some of the paperwork seemed to attempt to disguise the treatments as other conditions. Many of these trans-identified patients were enrolled in the Texas Children’s Health Plan STAR, a “no-cost Medicaid managed care plan.” despite the prohibition on Medicaid paying for such treatments.
In 2023, Dr. Roberts admitted that he had gender clinic patients whose treatments were covered through Medicaid. Despite the law changes, it appears as if this is still standard practice at the Texas Children’s Hospital.
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