Insurance regulators in Hawaii want to help people in the state compare health plans' gender transition benefits.
The effort may mean that agents, brokers and other benefits advisors in Hawaii — and in any states that follow Hawaii's lead — will have one more coverage detail to explain to clients.
The memo
Colin Hayashida, Hawaii's insurance commissioner, put the state's gender transition benefits disclosure guidelines in a new memo.
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Hayashida asked health coverage providers to post clear and complete gender identity benefits summaries on their websites.
The updates should include descriptions of any coverage for services related to gender transition, Hayashida wrote.
Hayashida addressed the memo to health maintenance organizations, and to any mutual benefit societies that provide health coverage, as well as to health insurance companies.
The gender identity benefits descriptions should go up on the web "as soon as possible and at the latest, prior to the effective date of plans for plan year 2022," Hayashida said.
Hayashida noted that the statutes of Hawaii prohibit health plans from discriminating against people with respect to either participation or coverage, based on actual or perceived gender identity.
He also cited a recent move by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to change how HHS interprets an Affordable Care Act provision that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. HHS now says it believes the term "discrimination on the basis of sex" includes "discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation" and "discrimination on the basis of gender identity."
Terminology
In the past, some people referred to gender transition procedures as "sex change" procedures.
The Health Industry Collaboration Effort — a volunteer-led health insurer consortium that includes representatives from many major health coverage providers, including Aetna, Aetna, Cigna, Humana, UnitedHealth and Centene's Health Net unit — suggested, in a communications tool kit approved in 2019, that use of the term "sex change" is exclusionary, and that use of terms such as "gender-affirming surgery" and "gender transition" is more sensitive.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
