My next question would be, how much coverage does this give for 'gender affirming care'? Obamacare means it's tax subsidised right? In a country famous for its private health care industry, that seems really strange.
Sorry for running late, but since ya didn't really quote me there, I didn't get a notification.
Obamacare is not direct from the federal gov health insurance coverage and its administration. State Medicaid programs and insurance companies do that. The Affordable Care Act (among many things) loosened Medicaid eligibility and created an "affordable" private health insurance "marketplace" that had subsidized coverage for those who fell below a certain income level. So states and the insurance companies determine what is and isn't covered in the various plans that are offered. And the feds chip in. Offhand I don't know how much. Some, for sure. I suspect that depends on how much the feds support individual states' Medicaid coverage for their residents. Red states aren't inclined to take federal money because there's ideological expectations attached when they do. (I recall something about red states refusing to expand their Medicaid, flipping the bird to Uncle Sam in the process.) Deals were, however, happily cut with the insurance companies. Basically the ACA told the insurance companies that they had to accept more people and provide wider coverage. And they would be reimbursed handsomely with federal tax dough when they did.
There was a "Public Option" proposed which would have been administered and provided by the US gov, but that was squashed. We prefer the appearance of free markets and capitalism over blatant socialism.
A fun fact about the ACA. It was based on Mitt Romney's health insurance legislation for Massachusetts. Which originated with the (wait for it!) Heritage Foundation.
And I was wrong. Well, sort of. There isn't any explicit language about gender identity discrimination in the ACA. That's inferred now, thanks to the SCOTUS Bostock* ruling that made gender identity and sexual orientation connected to sex discrimination and by extension to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As is typical for the US, judicial interpretation and leveraging "precedent" is preferred over the tedious and nasty business of Congress doing their jobs.
*Bostock was really 3 supreme court cases that were lumped together. Two were about getting fired for being gay and one for becoming a tranny. All three were ruled from a "discrimination on the basis of sex" angle. Or rather, the expectations derived from being one sex or another, and whether those expectations were discriminatory.
I've never looked at the prison and Medicaid "trans healthcare" lawsuits, but I bet that denying HRT and surgeries were ruled discriminatory based on Bostock. We can't have any bigoted expectations connected to sexed bodies. Not when federal dough is involved. Which is nearly always is now, one way or another.
Wikipedo's ACA page:
https://archive.ph/FWPeS
Tranny ACA page:
https://archive.ph/bWHIE
Tranny SCOTUS case:
https://archive.ph/CZyJq
