The broader picture is that there *are *Republican Congressmen who think their time is best spent finding ways to hurt “other” people, and a President who is willing to go along with them. The procedural mechanics aren’t significant.
PS: I agree this doesn’t survive his next tweet tantrum.
Link?
You think the size of that number is exaggerated? 
I think that the link would be a good one to post on Facebook in support of the idea that this isn’t really a financial issue.
It seems like a bad way to run a country to just let a POTUS issue a decree like this. Either Obama or Trump or anyone else. If such a far ranging policy decision can be made - and reversed - on one person’s whim, how is the military supposed to make any plans or maintain any continuity? I would think we would be better off if changes like this require both Congressional and Executive branch approval.
Trump also effectively fired thousands of people from the military today via Twitter.
They think. They don’t really know. But it’s right there, from their CO. An order:
Who would’ve thought that the first “you’re fired!” shot would be aimed at the men and women defending this country?
I’ll probably get ninja’d but here you go.
Googled for myself:
Though, if I’m honest, I have to admit that comparisons on raw numbers is strongly misleading. Really, we should be looking at cost-per-soldier.
The military has a general process of offering benefits to recruits to help get them started out in life, e.g. training in engineering, college scholarships, etc. While, I assume, they do hope to retain some percentage of soldiers for life careers in the military, they do mostly view themselves as a early-age occupation from which most people will move on from, but that serves as a good foundation for everything that will come later in life for those people.
In that respect, offering gender reassignment services could make sense. It’s something that helps a person, early in their life, to get stable and be ready for the rest of their life on a firm footing.
But, I would expect that whatever benefits the military offers are doled out equally to all comers. If you want gender reassignment, then you should not get a college scholarship. There should be a constant allotment for these sorts of benefits that is blind to the recipient, and neither shrinks nor grows based on who they are. If gender reassignment costs more than these other, similar benefits, then I would not find it reasonable to add in. If it is similar, then I would expect that to be what the person gets (if they choose it) and not anything else in addition. If a transgender person is somehow getting more out of the military than other comers, I don’t think that’s fair - and particularly not when it is likely that gender changes are going to cause a lot more hassle for dealing with that person than a person whose benefit is going to be a college scholarship.
I am completely supportive of gender rights and transgender rights, but math is math and fair is fair. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time at the moment to determine whether this is fair, so I am hoping that someone can tell me whether the military plan for supporting gender reassignment matched the criteria that I laid out or not.
I’m not seeing how this is “far ranging” since it affects maybe 0.1% of the folks in the military. I’m not offering that up as a defense, just that it’s strange to call this “far ranging”. Otherwise, though, running the military by committee doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. Especially a committee made up of > 600 individuals.
Curiously, the article says that less than 10% of the costs went to active servicemembers (as opposed to retirees and family members). So less than, say, $8.4 million.
(Also, while I understand that the Viagra thing is simply a rhetorical device, ED is associated with all sorts of service-related conditions, including PTSD and combat-related injuries.)
But that’s going to be true of Transgendered folk, too, eventually. You can retire from the military after just 20 years, so plenty of folks in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s…
Not the 10% exactly, but a goodly percent that could easily be 50%. (The ED stuff affecting older folks more than younger should be no surprise.)
So, if they get cancer, does the cost of the cancer treatment come out of that fixed benefit too? How about diabetes, or mental health issues?
You can choose as to whether you want chemo or college.
Point is, gender reassignment is prescribed by doctors to treat a recognized medical condition.
Agreed. You can’t ethically treat medical coverage like that. If you want to treat vacation time and college tuition as fungible, that’s one thing, but not medical coverage.
I would expect medical insurance coverage to be based on how much you or your parents have put in to your plan. If there isn’t enough in there for cancer or whatever else, then hopefully you know how to work gofundme.com or are willing to move your military benefits from option A to option B.
No, that’s not how insurance works. If I get cancer after 1 year on the plan, I don’t get less treatment than someone who was on the plan for 15 years. Insurance is purposely designed to operate differently from a bank account.
Maybe on one point. Maybe. Perhaps we need to know at what point someone realizes they are transgender and at what point they decide that such treatment is necessary. We take it as entirely reasonable that someone may be inclined to military service, but their decision is sealed by benefits offered, like college tuition, VA care, etc.
Would it be wrong to ask? Would it be wrong to accept someone who accepts “transgendered” as a label and advise that such treatment would not be available from the military? Because we would not want that to be an incentive? Dunno, thinking about it…
I dont understand how a transgendered person is more costly than a non-trans person. And why is the military is paying for hormone treatments and ED pills etc. Is this just work related health insurance? If so, is this gonna open up a whole can of worms that allows private workplaces to not hire transgendered persons because the resultant insurance costs would be prohibitive?
So many questions. . .
This is not an area I know anything about. But are the unique costs associated with being trans-gendered ongoing. I mean, surely, it’s not the same cost per person per year in perpetuity (I tried to calculate the per person per year cost from the RAND report and wasn’t smart enough. But it looks likely to be pretty high).
So, it’s not going to be people who began transitioning while on active duty and then continue incurring costs. (Right?). The question, then, is what does the healthcare plan do for transgendered retirees (i.e., those who transition after their term of service) and transgendered family members of military personnel?
(And, of course, does the Trump announcement apply to those people as well? Which is hard to predict at this stage.)
I did think about that. The problem, as I see it, is that as long as it is a legit medical condition, and the consensus in the medical community is that treatment involves sex reassignment surgery, then we’re putting a value judgement above a medical one. It might be OK for a private company to do that, but not the government.
I have a hard time, myself, understanding Transgendered people. But IANAD, so I’m willing to defer to those who are. And I think our government should so as well.
The RAND medical cost estimates were made with private coverage as the basis. That is probably something that could be significantly off base - one way or the other.