Several of the largest American corporations have started expanding their employer sponsored insurance to include coverage of transgender surgery. The reason why these big companies have decided to include the needs of transgendered employees in their health insurance plans is so that the company can stay competitive with other companies.
Some of the corporations who have decided to expand their employee insurance plans to cover the health needs of their transgender workers are Coca Cola, Yahoo!, American Express, AT&T, New York Life, and Wells Fargo. Other corporations may be considering making the same additions to their own employee health insurance plans.
Part of the reason why has to do with the Human Rights Campaign. Big companies want to get a 100% rating in the Corporate Equality Index by the Human Rights Campaign. This is so the companies can continue to be seen as competitive. The next Corporate Equality Index will be published in Autumn of this year. Corporations who want to appear in the index with a 100% rating will have to offer their employees an insurance plan that covers at least $75,000 worth of transgender surgery, as well as other treatments that are recommended by the doctors of the employees who need this type of surgery.
Other reasons for expanding employee health insurance is because the corporations do not want to lose valuable employees who need health care coverage that their corporation is not offering. It makes good business sense to try and do what you can to retain an employee who is knowledgable about the company, well trained, and has years of hands on experience doing the job than it does to hire a brand new person, and take years to get the new person to be as useful as the original employee was.
People who have Gender Identity Disorder, who are not getting treatment or counseling for it, tend to be at a higher risk of suicide than people who do not have to deal with this particular disorder. Workers who are depressed are not as productive as workers who are happy. Corporations with happy workers are likely to make more money than those who have severely unhappy workers. Offering insurance coverage to workers who need transgender surgery will, in effect, make that worker more productive. It’s all about the bottom line of the corporation.
The American Medical Association sees gender reassignment surgery as a medically indicated procedure, and not as a cosmetic one. They want insurance companies to view it as medical, too. There have been fears that if a company starts offering transgender surgery that a lot of people will want it, and it will end up costing the company too much money. This is illogical. Health insurance covers appendicitis, but not all employees seek this form of surgery unless they have a medical need for it. The same would be true for transgender surgery.
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