The Biden Justice Department is pulling out all the stops to shut down criticism and public comment on a program at Texas Children’s Hospital that specializes in so-called “gender-affirming care.”
Today, the Department of Justice indicted Dr. Eithan Haim, a resident at Baylor College of Medicine, on four bogus counts of “wrongfully obtaining individually identifiable health information.”
Haim, a Dallas surgeon, previously had done some work at Texas Children’s Hospital as part of his residency. The indictment against Haim alleges that in 2023, he asked to reactivate his login there to access information on pediatric patients not under his care, including names, attending physicians and treatment codes, then turned over the information to a media contact.
Haim has publicly identified himself as the person who gave the information about patients at Texas Children’s to a conservative activist, who published a story that the hospital was providing transgender care for minors in secret. At the time, transgender care for minors was legal in Texas, but the hospital had announced in 2022 that it would stop would stop gender-affirming therapies.
Texas lawmakers banned transgender care for minors in September 2023. That law is being challenged in court. At least 25 states have adopted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, and most of those states face lawsuits.
BACKGROUND: DOJ Targets Surgeon Who Exposed Children’s Hospital Over Gender-Affirming Surgeries on Minors
Another action today shows how seriously the Biden DOJ takes the legal threat to transgenderism and the importance they attach to keeping the public, including elected state officials and law enforcement, ignorant of what goes on in at least one hospital that allegedly performs alleged illegal transgender surgeries, allegedly.
Then a nurse, Vanessa Sivadge, noticed blatant financial fraud. Sivadge was questioned by the FBI in regard to the case against Dr. Haim, and she now reported on observed cases of Medicaid fraud.
Sivadge noticed another critical piece of information: Patient A and Patient B, like several other “transgender” patients, were enrolled in Texas Children’s Health Plan STAR, a “no-cost Medicaid managed care plan.”
Despite the law, which prohibited billing Medicaid for “gender-affirming care,” it appears that this was a standard practice at Texas Children’s Hospital. As Roberts himself admitted in a 2023 affidavit related to the lawsuit against SB 14, he had several patients in his transgender medicine program “who receive their health coverage through Medicaid.”
According to a legal expert with deep knowledge of Texas Medicaid law, the essential facts are as follows: Patients A and B had coverage through Texas Children’s Plan STAR; the doctors explicitly treated them for the purpose of “gender-affirming care”; and the standard practice would be for the hospital to submit this care for reimbursement through the state Medicaid program. It would be extremely unlikely, according to this expert, for the hospital to forgo this practice and, for example, cover the cost of its “gender-affirming care” program from its own budget.
“Based on the facts we have, the only reasonable conclusion is that Texas Children’s Hospital was using Texas Medicaid funds to pay for ‘gender-affirming care,’ contrary to Texas law,” said the legal expert.
For Sivadge, there was no doubt about what was happening. “The largest children’s hospital in the country is illegally billing Medicaid for transgender procedures,” she said. “It is evident that the hospital continues to believe it is above the law not just by concealing the existence of their transgender medicine program from the public, but by stealing from the federal government.”
Today, the FBI visited her again to discuss her role in that ongoing investigation.
Let me take a break for a second for a public service announcement on behalf of anyone who may be questioned by law enforcement.
Chris Rufo, who, naturally, is at ground zero of this story, has more context into why Dr. Haim was indicted and why the FBI has decided that a totally non-intimidating “visit” of a whistle-blower on a Medicaid fraud investigation at her home, unannounced, is the way to go.
A few years ago, Texas Children’s Hospital made no secret of its support for transgender medicine. Its doctors proudly administered puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and other medical interventions to children who self-identified as “trans.”
Then the tone shifted. In the face of public pressure, CEO Mark Wallace announced that he was shutting down the child gender clinic. But doctors at the hospital, including Richard Ogden Roberts, David Paul, and Kristy Rialon, never stopped.
The public would not have known if not for a courageous surgeon, Eithan Haim, who felt morally obligated to expose the subterfuge. He contacted me about how the hospital had lied about terminating the transgender medicine program, and that doctors were, in fact, continuing to perform sex-change procedures on children as young as 11.
The Biden administration, such as it is, is 100 percent supportive of the unwelcome visit to Ms. Sivadge’s home and Dr. Haim’s indictment on laughable charges. These charges are intended solely to bully and harass witnesses to wrongdoing into silence. This tactic is part of Merrick Garland’s playbook and has become the FBI’s go-to tool.
