Vice President JD Vance has referred doctors and medical entities to the Department of Justice following a major report that exposed practices allowing providers to benefit from gender-affirming care.
“This Administration will not stand idly by while some in the medical community harm our children in search of profit. That is why today I am referring this matter to the Department of Justice to launch a federal criminal investigation,” Vance wrote on social media. “We will stop this fraud and restore trust in public health.”
In his letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche, Vance described that “some pediatric gender clinics and children’s hospitals have apparently used misleading or even fraudulent diagnostic and billing codes to ensure that insurance companies will cover the procedures.”
Miscoding the diagnoses has “allowed hospitals to bill insurance companies tens of millions of dollars for medications like puberty-blocking drugs,” he wrote, adding, “When providers miscode treatment in order to secure insurance coverage for gender-transitioning interventions that insurance would not otherwise cover, they should be held accountable.” If providers have “done so intentionally,” Vance said, “thereby perpetrating a fraud on Medicaid or on private insurers, they should go to prison.”
The report at the center of the referrals, called “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of ‘Gender Medicine,'” describes what HHS said is “insurance coding practices, perverse financial incentives, and the provision of sex-rejecting procedures for minors.”
According to the report, more than 225 hospitals and health systems across the country created gender programs for minors. Using claims data from 2015 to 2025, the report found an estimated $50 million in insurance claims for puberty blockers billed using an endocrine disorder diagnostic code. Another nearly $11 million in claims for patients between the ages of 13 and 17 were billed under a precocious puberty code.
