BOISE, Idaho — A ban on public funds, including Medicaid, being used for gender-affirming care has taken another step, passing through the Senate State Affairs Committee and heading to the Senate floor.
Related | New hurdle to gender-affirming care making its way to the state House
The bill, HB 668, would prohibit the use of public funds when used for "altering the appearance of an individual in order to affirm the individual's perception of the individual's sex in a way."
The bill would also ban the use of any state property, facility, or building to provide gender-affirming care.
It made it through the committee with a 4-3 vote in favor of moving it to the Senate floor. Republican Sen. Jim Guthrie, and Democrats Sen. Melissa Wintrow and Sen. James D. Ruchti, voted against the bill.
The bill passed through the House earlier this week with a vote of 58-11-1.
"This is a tax-payer bill," said Rep. Julianne Young, of of the sponsors of the bill. "This is about whether we're going to use public funds to provide highly controversial, potentially medically harmful, and irreversible medical procedures and surgeries."
According to the Mayo Clinic, puberty blockers, which are included in this bill, are reversible as they serve as a pause to puberty.
"When a person stops taking GnRH analogs, puberty starts again," according to the Mayo Clinic staff.
Gender affirmation surgeries are usually considered irreversible.
Every person who came to testify on Thursday, outside of the bill's sponsors, testified against the bill.
"This bill will impact many Idaho health systems, Medicaid is certainly the largest in terms of numbers of people, but it's not the only one," said Julianne Donnelly Tzul, with the ACLU of Idaho. "It will also impact all hospitals that are publicly funded, all universities whose employees and students' health care are funded with public dollars, all state employees with health care funded by the state, all the hundreds of thousands of Idaho voters whose health care is paid by Medicaid."
The bill will be filed for reading in the Senate.
