Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the city council are now set to approve the addition of sex change surgery to city employees’ health care coverage, sources report.
Even as the Windy City is slammed by a $1 billion budget deficit—as pension costs are set to bury the city and as the city has been downgraded umpteen times to junk bond status—the city now looks to add even more costs to the city’s health care coverage.
Celebrating the new policy, Mayor Emanuel insisted that the addition of sex change coverage to the health care plan will make sure employees can get “the medical care that they need.”
Emanuel expects the addition of sex change coverage to go into effect on October 1 after approval by the city’s Benefits Committee, which is expected to take up the issue on August 11.
Chicago’s health care plan was recently criticized by the Civil Liberties Union of Illinois for not being attentive enough to the needs of “transgender” employees.
In a letter to the city, John Knight, the local ACLU’s director of the LGBT and AIDS Project, criticized the city for not having enough coverage for transgender people, saying that “other people” get better coverage.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston, or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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