By The Daily Wire (World News) | Created at 2026-08-13 15:15:52 | Updated at 2026-08-13 16:19:44
6 hours ago
Vice President JD Vance’s Fraud Task Force is referring a number of hospitals and clinics to the Justice Department and the HHS Inspector General for possible violations of federal law.
Those hospitals have billed millions of dollars in insurance claims for puberty blockers for children, according to a new Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report. Now the Trump administration is investigating.
HHS released “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of ‘Gender Medicine'” on Thursday morning. The report examines insurance coding, financial incentives, and the “provision” of transgender medical procedures for minors, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
It’s the first time in history that HHS examined the financial incentives behind the pediatric gender medicine industry that has exploded over the last decade, leaving many young people mentally and physically harmed in its wake.
Over 225 hospitals and health systems established pediatric gender programs across the country, the report found. Between 2015 and 2025, there were approximately $50 million in insurance claims for puberty blockers that were billed using the endocrine disorder diagnostic code E34.9 — a billable code used when a patient has a hormone problem.
“These allegations are crazy, and they demand investigation,” Vance said in a video obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire. “When children may have been harmed, and families misled, it’s on those of us in power to find the truth and to seek justice for kids who were harmed by these doctors.”
“Using this code in place of a gender-related diagnosis (e.g., gender identity disorder, F64.0) violates CMS guidelines for the simple reason that gender dysphoria is not an endocrine disorder, since it exhibits no hormonal abnormalities,” the report states. “In fact, the only endocrine disorders these patients have are the ones created by their doctors through the use of sex-rejecting interventions. Yet it appears that healthcare providers are misusing this code.”
The report cites a 2016 study titled “Identifying the Transgender Population in the Medicare Program” in which CMS’s Office of Minority Health states that “proxy diagnosis codes are being substituted for gender dysphoria.” In the methods section, the authors explain how they included the code for Unspecified Endocrine Disorder because it is “frequently used by the transgender community to combat the perceived stigma of a GID diagnosis.”
Doctors and practitioners of “pediatric gender care” have been using this code to bill insurance claims for children for whom they prescribe “gender-affirming” puberty blockers, or prescription medication that stops a child’s puberty. While transgender advocates claim that halting a child’s puberty helps them feel more comfortable in their body before they begin testosterone or estrogen treatments or undergo transgender surgeries, critics argue that the puberty blockers carry significant risks to the child’s fertility, bone density, and more.
The new HHS report also found that hospitals and clinics billed nearly $11 million in claims for patients between the ages of 13 and 17 using a diagnosis code for precocious puberty (E30.1). That finding also signals to HHS and the task force that there should be additional review of insurance coding practices.
“The findings raise serious questions about what families were told, what insurers were told, and how these procedures were billed,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in the video message obtained by The Daily Wire.
“HHS will follow the evidence, protect taxpayers, and hold accountable anyone who broke the law or violated the trust of patients and families,” he vowed in a statement issued Thursday. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are restoring transparency and integrity to American medicine.”
HHS’ report offers recommendations on how to strengthen oversight of insurance coding practices and make sure that billing practices flagged as potentially improper are thoroughly reviewed.
It was compiled by a number of top gender experts and researchers who have been outspoken on pediatric gender practices under the Biden administration, including Eithan Haim, a doctor targeted by the former administration for speaking out against transgender medical practices in Texas, Quentin Van Meter, a board-certified pediatric endocrinologist with 46 years of continuous clinical experience, Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue, Victoria Coley of the Independent Women’s Forum, May Mailman, the director of the Independent Women’s Law Center, and Rachel Morrison of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
“The research and first-hand stories in this report demonstrates potential large-scale fraud, and a critical need for more accountability and rigorous oversight of the medical providers, insurers, advocacy organizations, and government agencies that not only allowed, but often encouraged it,” the report concludes. “Because of the dangerous combination of ideology and financial incentives, we believe the potential fraud exposed in this report is only the tip of the iceberg.”
Assistant Secretary for Health, Admiral Brian Christine, has been outspoken in his desire to end the promotion of transgender procedures for kids, describing such procedures as “sex-denying,” and emphasizing the harm that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries cause to these confused young people.
“Our responsibility as healthcare professionals, first and foremost, is to do no harm,” he said on Thursday. “As HHS’ commissioned report Wolves in White Coats details, the medical establishment created what the report describes as ‘captive patients,’ placing vulnerable children on a path toward potentially lifelong medical interventions.”
Christine vowed that HHS is committed to protecting kids from these procedures, as well as “following the evidence, and restoring trust in American medicine.”
