A Wisconsin judge just ruled that denying prison inmates hormonal therapy constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. That is, the taxpayers are required to pay for hormonal therapy for inmates with gender identity disorder. As is their custom, the ACLU treats this potentially expensive entitlement as “common sense” and minimizes the potential cost and scope of this case:
A federal judge has struck down a Wisconsin law that prohibits prison inmates from getting hormone therapy to treat gender identity disorder….
In Wednesday’s order, Clevert found that the law amounts to “deliberate indifference to the plaintiffs’ serious medical needs in violation of the Eighth Amendment,” because it denies hormone therapy without regard to those needs or doctors’ judgments. He found the law unconstitutional on its face and also in violation of the inmates’ rights to equal protection….
(An) ACLU attorney on the case, John Knight, called the decision common sense.“The court’s ruling doesn’t require inmates to receive hormones or surgery for sex reassignment, it simply means that doctors are the ones who make the decisions about treatment,” he said. He estimated fewer than a dozen inmates are affected.
State law makers passed the Sex Change Prevention Act in 2005 in reaction to the case of a Wisconsin inmate who had been receiving the hormones for years, but sued when the Department of Corrections would not pay for sex-change surgery.
So here is the question about incentives: let us suppose this case is just the beginning and the court eventually finds that taxpayers are required to pay the costs of sexual reassignment surgery. let us suppose that some people who would like to have sex reassignment surgery are not covered by insurance (I have no idea what Obamacare does about this surgery. But since we don’t know when and if Obamacare is ever going to be implemented, let’s bracket that issue for now.)
It seems to me that this court is creating an incentive for people to commit crimes serious enough to get themselves put into jail, to receive the benefit of sex reassignment surgery at state expense.
Will never happen, you say? No one expected that people would disable themselves in order to qualify for protections and benefits under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Yet, disability fraud, or at least ambiguity about what counts as a disability, turned out to be a highly litigated issue in the decade after the ADA.
do not underestimate what people will do for the sake of taxpayer provided goodies.