Murray Joins Markey, Wyden in Effort to Stop Trump Assault on Hospitals Providing Care to Transgender Americans

11 Senate Democrats Call on Trump Administration to Stop Getting Between Doctors and Families
Washington, D.C.– Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA)—a former chair and senior member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, joined Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR), Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), and other Senate Democrats in calling for the Trump administration to withdraw two proposed regulations that would place unprecedented restrictions on health care providers, like hospitals, for providing gender-affirming care to young Americans. The rules would restrict health care providers from participating in Medicare and Medicaid if they provide this life-saving care, forcing hospitals to make an impossible choice or risk being cut out of the health care system.
“This policy would mark an unprecedented intrusion of partisan politics and ideology into medical decision-making and severely restrict access to evidence-based, medically-necessary care,”the senators wrote.“This proposed rule would place the federal government directly between physicians, patients, and families by conditioning hospital participation in Medicare and Medicaid on the denial of individualized, clinician-directed care. The conditions of participation (CoPs) for hospitals have never before been used to compel providers to disregard their medical judgment or prevent patients from receiving care that clinicians, in consultation with patients and parents, determine to be medically appropriate.”
The letters, sent to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz, offer detailed comments on the proposed regulations. The first makes clear that using conditions of participation to restrict specific types of medical care that do not align with the administration’s extreme ideology violates guardrails put in place by Congress that prevent the federal government from dictating to medical professionals the type of care that hospitals can or cannot provide. The second explains how the proposal violates core Medicaid statutory requirements by denying medically-necessary care and substituting federal ideology for clinician judgment.
In addition to Senators Murray, Markey, and Wyden, the letter was also signed by Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Tina Smith (D-MN), and Tammy Duckworth (D-IL).
The full letters are availableHERE.
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