The health expense associated with transition care for transgender military personnel would not be cost prohibitive if a ban on them openly serving is lifted, according to a new analysis.
There are about 12,800 personnel serving in the armed forces who are forced to conceal their gender identities. Should they seek transition medical care, it would cost an estimated $5.6 million a year, or 22 cents per member a month, according to a research article published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Author Aaron Belkin, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, used the average cost of transition-related care, which included surgery, hormone therapy, or both, from health insurance plans offered by the University of California as the basis for his calculations. The average cost for care came out to $29,929 per person needing treatment over a period of six-and-a-half years.
He found the cost of providing such care would amount to “little more than a rounding error” within the military's total annual healthcare budget of $47.8 billion. The study's goal is to counter claims by critics who oppose the military paying for transition-related care.
“Even if actual costs exceed these estimates on a per-capita basis for persons requiring care, the total cost of providing transition-related care will always have a negligible effect on the military health budget because of the small number treated and the cost savings that the provision of such care will yield,” he wrote. “The financial cost of transition-related care, in short, is too low to matter.”
Opponents have criticized Defense Secretary Ash Carter's announcement in July that the Pentagon would form a working group to study the readiness implications of welcoming transgender persons to serve openly.
Few have been more vocal than former Arkansas Gov. and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. During the the GOP primary debate Aug. 6, Huckabee was asked about the prospect of allowing transgender people to serve openly. His response: The military is not “a social experiment.”
“The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things," he said. “It's not to transform the culture by trying out some ideas that some people think would make us a different country and more diverse.”
The medical community has voiced support for transgender people to serve openly in the military. During its annual meeting in Chicago in June, the American Medical Association adopted a resolution stating there was no medical basis for the military to exclude transgender individuals from service.
