The Trump administration is doing as much damage as humanly possible to the pro-LGBTQ health policy gains that were made under President Obama. Politico’s Dan Diamond writes:
The nation's health department is taking steps to dismantle LGBT health initiatives, as political appointees have halted or rolled back regulations intended to protect LGBT workers and patients, removed LGBT-friendly language from documents and reassigned the senior adviser dedicated to LGBT health.
The sharp reversal from Obama-era policies carries implications for a population that's been historically vulnerable to discrimination in health care settings, say LGBT health advocates. A Health Affairs study last year found that many LGBT individuals have less access to care than heterosexuals; in a Harvard-Robert Wood Johnson-NPR survey one in six LGBT individuals reported experiencing discrimination from doctors or at a clinic. [...]
The changes at the Department of Health and Human Services represent "rapid destruction of so much of the progress on LGBT health," said Kellan Baker, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who worked with HHS on LGBT issues for nearly a decade. “It’s only a matter of time before all the gains made under the Obama administration are reversed under the Trump administration, for purposes that have nothing to do with public health and have everything to do with politics.”
HHS not only altered data collection policies that are critical to understanding access to care for gay and transgender individuals, the agency also recently created a new division devoted to supporting health workers who have moral objections to providing care to LGBTQ individuals. Remember this?
A few idiot publications and some gay Republicans fell for that pile of crap, though no one with any sense did. Gee, who could have imagined things would turn so sour for LGBTQ Americans after Trump picked Mike Pence as his running mate?
Trump lied on the campaign trail and, to no one's surprise, his White House is flat-out lying now.
"The policies of the Trump administration are intended to improve the lives of all Americans, including the LGBTQ community," White House principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah said in a statement.
Lying is just a part of the daily White House ritual now.
Upon taking office last year, the Trump administration swiftly froze a series of LGBT-friendly rules, including proposed new regulations to further ban discrimination in Medicare and Medicaid. A regulation that would have allowed transgender HHS staff more protections when using the department's bathrooms and other facilities also was ignored.
"It was signed and technically finished on Jan. 19, 2017, but not posted online," said one staffer. "And the new administration considered it unpublished and pulled it back." [...]
Meanwhile, the agency's senior adviser for LGBT health — a lawyer named Elliot Kennedy — was reassigned from the HHS secretary's office to an HHS office in Rockville, Md., to work on disease prevention.
This is how Trump and his minions are working to "improve the lives" of LGBTQ Americans.