Early last month New York State health officials partially lifted a 17-year-old ban on transgender health care from Medicaid, affording people seeking surgeries transitioning from one gender to another coverage for the procedures.
But a key element to transgender health care is still unavailable because there are no surgeons in New York City who specialize in gender reassignment surgery. People who want to have bottom surgery, changing their body below the belt, and top surgery, which changes the body above the belt, need to go out of state for their operations, making the process more complicated, expensive and harrowing.
The regulation, which took effect March 11, has left Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital, which hopes to be the first in New York to provide transitional surgeries, scrambling to meet the new demand.
