photos redit: Elizabeth Winterbourne // Shutterstock
We thought all the done after the bathroom law was taken away, but here we are against looking at another lawsuit in our state over transgender rights.
North Carolina is being sued this time by state employees who argue that the health plan for them violates federal health and education laws, as well as constitutional rights, by refusing to pay for hormone treatments and surgeries that it once covered. The treatments prescribed by doctors to treat gender dysphoria are described as life-saving by five current or former state employees, along with two transgender dependents, who are suing.
The state employee health plan, which provides benefits for approximately 720,000 people, had covered the transition procedures for transgender people for the year 2017. But the lawsuit said coverage was excluded from the plan for the years after that under Republican State Treasurer Dale Folwell, who took office in 2017. A spokesman for Falwell said in an email that a previous treasurer had voted with the health plan’s board to cover the procedures for a year, but that no action was taken to extend the coverage under Folwell.
The plaintiffs say the exclusion of coverage for transition-related treatments violates the federal Title IX education law, the constitution’s equal-protection clause and the federal Affordable Care Act.
After the bathroom bill was denied, the replacement law received just as much backlash, banning local government from passing measures to protect the LGBTQ community from nondiscrimination ordinances for workplaces, hotels and restaurants until December 2020. Gov. Roy Cooper called it an imperfect compromise adding it was not his “preferred solution.”
Written by Clarke Jones
Source: WNCT