By Breitbart News Network | Created at 2026-08-14 19:44:12 | Updated at 2026-08-14 23:48:57
22 hours ago
Hospitals allegedly used false diagnostic codes to bill insurers for puberty blockers and other sex-change drugs given to minors, according to a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report released Thursday.
The report, titled Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of “Gender Medicine,” found that more than 225 hospitals and health systems established pediatric gender programs nationwide. HHS referred the findings to its Office of the Inspector General to determine whether federal laws were broken.
Vice President JD Vance tied the alleged scheme to money in a post on X.
“For years now, some hospitals and healthcare providers have been subjecting children to horrific, experimental treatments in service of radical gender ideologies. Today, thanks to the Wolves in White Coats report released by @HHSGov, we know why: profit,” Vance wrote. “It turns out that convincing vulnerable children to reject their gender can create patients for life, earning hospitals tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue per child.”
Vance said providers “may have been defrauding Medicaid and private insurers by using misleading or fraudulent billing codes to get insurance to cover the costs.”
Providers billed puberty blockers under a general hormone-disorder code, it found. That code, E34.9, describes an “endocrine disorder, unspecified.” It does not describe gender dysphoria.
The report identified roughly $50 million in claims for puberty blockers billed that way for patients aged 9 to 17 between 2015 and 2025. It found a second proxy in “precocious puberty,” a diagnosis for children who begin puberty unusually early. Nearly $11 million in such claims were billed for patients aged 13 to 17, ages at which the diagnosis does not apply.
The report cautions that its claims figures are “directional signals rather than findings” and require verification against underlying records.
Vance, who leads the White House anti-fraud task force, sent the full report to Attorney General Todd Blanche and asked him to investigate. He said providers who miscode treatment “should be held accountable.” He went further in his letter. “If they have done so intentionally, thereby perpetrating a fraud on Medicaid or on private insurers, they should go to prison,” Vance wrote.
Independent of the report, coverage has put a name to the kind of provider it describes. A New York Times profile, relayed by Sinclair’s The National Desk, described a Miami surgeon, Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, who performs “top surgery,” or removal of the breasts, on teenagers. Gallagher said she operates on about 40 patients a month, one or two of them minors, usually at least 15, the profile reported. She has operated on a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old, she said. The surgery violates Florida health department guidelines but is not currently illegal in the state, and there is no indication she operates without parental consent.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services cut off federal Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program funding for sex-change procedures on minors. It follows a May settlement in which Texas Children’s Hospital agreed to pay $10 million to resolve claims that it billed Texas Medicaid for the interventions using false diagnosis codes.
The report drew quick reaction online.
