New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) wrote a letter to insurance companies this week, warning that they will no longer be allowed to refuse to cover gender reassignment surgery, hormone therapy or other treatments needed to change a person’s gender if a doctor deems such treatments medically necessary.
In the letter, Cuomo highlighted a state law requiring insurance coverage for the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders, saying that this law also covers individuals with gender dysphoria, the medical term for a mismatch between a person’s physical sex and their internal sense of gender.
“An issuer of a policy that includes coverage for mental health conditions may not exclude coverage for the diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoria,” the governor’s letter says, according to the New York Times, which received a copy.
By enacting this policy change, New York becomes the ninth state to require this coverage, joining California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. According to the New York Times and the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, most policies outside of these states exclude coverage for transgender treatment or include it only as a costly add-on to a more traditional plan.
Spokespeople for the insurance industry worry that the plan will drive up costs in the state. Leslie Moran, a spokeswoman for the New York Health Plan Association, told the Times that while the industry did not object to covering gender dysphoria, the industry was concerned that the policy shift would raise costs in 2015 which were not considered when rates were set.
The state superintendent of financial services, Benjamin Lawsky, stressed that transgeder individuals represent a very small portion of the insurance pool and that he would be “very surprised” if the shift resulted in a noticeable increase in insurance premiums. He praised the change as a means to “further solidify” the rights of people who “weren’t always being treated as equal to everybody else [sic].”
