Georgia county refuses to stop fighting for the right to deny trans employees healthcare coverage

A Georgia county has continued its relentless pursuit to avoid covering gender-affirming surgery for a public employee.

This week, Houston County has appealed a 2022 ruling that requires its insurance plan to cover gender-affirming care for employees. It is not only seeking to reverse the decision but also to take back the $60,000 in damages that was awarded to the trans plaintiff who brought the suit.

Related: A county spent $1.2 million in legal fees to avoid paying $10K for trans-inclusive health care

And they still lost and have to pay for the health care now.

In 2019, Anna Lange – a police sergeant in the small town of Perry, Georgia – filed a federal lawsuit against the Houston County Board of Commissioners after it denied her request for insurance coverage for gender-affirming surgery.

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Three years later, a district court judge ruled in Lange v. Houston County that officials in Houston County had violated protections afforded under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964  by denying Lange gender-affirming care under the county’s employee health plan.

In the years-long legal battle, the county spent $1.2 million –nearly three times its annual physical and mental health budget – to avoid paying the $10,000 for Lange’s surgery.

Lawyers for the county cited soaring health insurance premiums and argued that eliminating the exclusion on gender-affirming care would lead to requests to remove other exclusions.

An expert hired by Lange’s attorneys argued that the cost of including gender-affirming care in the county’s health plan would be “an amount so low that it would be considered immaterial.”

And yet the county is still fighting for the right to deny this coverage – even though Lange has already had the surgery.

According to the Associated Press, Lange believes the case will again end in a victory for her. “The law is on our side, clearly,” she said.

David Brown, Lange’s lawyer, added that it’s a “simple case” because “the Supreme Court has established that an employer who offers unequal benefits because of sex violates Title VII.”

The AP reported that after Lange first came out as trans to Sheriff Cullen Talton, he told her he did not “believe in sex changes.”

The county has denied coverage for gender-affirming care since at least 1998, and it continued to do so even after the county’s own insurance administrator determined in 2016 that excluding gender-affirming treatment from the county’s health plan violated the Affordable Care Act.

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