FIRST ON FOX: Vice President JD Vance is calling for the Department of Justice to investigate a bombshell Health and Human Services (HHS) report alleging some hospitals and healthcare providers fraudulently subjected children to lucrative sex-change procedures.
The new report, titled: "Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of 'Gender Medicine,'" revealed more than $60 million in insurance claims for treatments including puberty blockers for adolescents as young as 13 billed from 2015 to 2025.
According to HHS, some providers aggressively treated children who presented with hormonal issues, endocrine system problems, or early onset puberty with transgender care, billing insurance companies. HHS also blamed Biden-era policies promoting transgender treatments for expanding access gender surgery coverage.
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Fox News Digital obtained a letter from Vance to Attorney General Todd Blanche which detailed Vance’s concerns surrounding the report, and called for criminal prosecution of anyone who has intentionally misled children to get transgender treatment.
"One study showed that only about 4.7 percent of patients diagnosed with "endocrine disorder, unspecified," had that actual condition," Vance wrote in the letter to Blanche. "Another notes a 30 percent increase in the number of endocrine disorder diagnoses, despite it being unlikely that that there has been a substantial increase in pediatric endocrine disorders."
The average healthcare cost for a minor is roughly $3,000, but transgender treatments can push that to $75,000 without surgery and nearly $170,000, if surgery is involved, according to the report.
The report also details how some healthcare providers profit from life-long medical costs, including prescriptions, surgeries and medical interventions years after a minor reaches adulthood.
About 225 hospitals and health systems across the country have established pediatric gender programs. Vance charged in his letter to Blanche that health care providers knowingly pushed their misdiagnoses to insurance companies, using billing codes to compel coverage.
"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," read Vance’s letter. "If they have done so intentionally, thereby perpetrating a fraud on Medicaid or on private insurers, they should go to prison."
"Rather than allow the proliferation of harmful, sex-rejecting procedures on our children, we must send a clear message that any hospitals and providers that have participated in these practices will face justice."
The HHS report cited peer-reviewed scientific literature, hospital records, whistleblower testimony, nationwide insurance claims analyses and interviews with patients and parents.
Hours after President Joe Biden was sworn into office in 2021, he signed Executive Order 13988, titled: "Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation."
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"Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports," the executive order read. "People should be able to access healthcare and secure a roof over their heads without being subjected to sex discrimination."
The executive order’s mandate took effect, and in May of 2021, Biden’s HHS said its Office of Civil Rights would enforce an Affordable Care Act nondiscrimination provision, which includes sex discrimination.
In a March 2022 notice, the department "unequivocally" confirmed "that gender affirming care for minors, when medically appropriate and necessary, improves their physical and mental health."
In a separate executive order signed by Biden in June of 2022, Biden directed the federal government, including his HHS, to "address the discrimination and barriers that LGBTQI+ individuals and families face by expanding access to comprehensive health care."
Fox News Digital also obtained a letter from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to HHS Inspector General Thomas March Bell that included a sizable list of individual hospitals and clinicians that Kennedy says exhibit "potentially anomalous billing patterns."
The report calls for additional review of insurance coding practices that enable hospitals and clinicians to file claims for gender medicine.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Justice Department but did not receive a response in time for publication.