By Greg Piper
August 19, 2026
A day after the Trump administration ended federal funding of “sex-rejecting procedures on children,” otherwise known as gender affirming care, Vice President J.D. Vance and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. referred hospitals and gender clinics identified in a new HHS billing fraud report for prosecution and investigation.
Vance’s letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche asks the Justice Department to investigate whether flagged providers violated the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, False Claims Act and federal fraud and conspiracy laws by “intentionally” miscoding treatment to “secure insurance coverage for gender-transitioning interventions that insurance would not otherwise cover.”
If so, “they should go to prison.”
“More than just pushing these procedures on kids, hospitals and providers may have been defrauding Medicaid and private insurers by using misleading or fraudulent billing codes to get insurance to cover the costs,” Vance said in an X thread on the report and criminal referral.
Kennedy’s letter to HHS Inspector General T. March Bell asks him to review “an objectively defined cohort of claims that exhibit potentially anomalous billing patterns” by hundreds of flagged providers in the HHS report, which may violate federal law.
The secretary’s letter identifies four fishy cohorts: claims for puberty blockers with endocrine disorder diagnosis on the same claim with “no gender diagnosis” and “no precocious puberty” diagnosis, ages 9-17; claims for puberty blockers with precocious puberty diagnosis, 13-17; claims for “primary gender dysphoria” diagnosis with a cross-sex hormone prescription “written the same day” in a state where that’s prohibited for minors, 17 and younger; and affiliates to whom prescribers billed at least 95% of their claims in a prescription year and are registered at one of their addresses, all of them Planned Parenthood clinics.
READ MORE:
Federal probe uncovers potential fraud in child gender treatments at major hospitals
BOTTOMLINE
Vice President J.D. Vance and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. referred hospitals, clinics, and other providers identified in a new HHS report on potential billing irregularities related to pediatric gender-related treatments (referred to in the report as “sex-rejecting procedures” or “gender medicine”) to the Department of Justice and HHS Office of Inspector General for investigation of possible federal law violations.
This occurred shortly after the Trump administration finalized a rule ending federal Medicaid and CHIP funding for such procedures on minors.
HHS released the report Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of “Gender Medicine,” which examines insurance coding practices, financial incentives, claims data (primarily 2015–2025), scientific literature, whistleblower accounts, and other sources.
It notes growth in pediatric gender programs (over 225 hospitals/health systems) and estimates significant billings for related services on minors (e.g., nearly $120 million in submitted charges involving surgeries, hormones, or puberty blockers in recent years per some cited data).
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