While I fully understand that we, the general, law abiding public, have an obligation to provide health care to those who have been incarcerated for one reason or another, I do have a problem when the care we are providing seems a bit over the top. I understand that general health care needs to be provided for all those men and women who have managed to become wards of the state, and I fully accept that, since many of them do not need to be among the rest of us law abiding citizens. Some merely need to pay their debt to society and they too should be taken care of by the state for medical issues.
But there does come a time when I believe common sense should take over. Even insurance companies won’t cover some kinds of medical care, considering it elective surgery rather than life saving surgery. Take for instance the recent Federal judgment requiring the Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC) to provide a sex change operation for a “transgender” inmate doing time for murdering, now get this, his wife.
It seems Michelle (Robert) Kosilek was born a man but has received hormone treatments and lives as a woman in an all-male prison. Last week, U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf ruled that Massachusetts DOC ought to pay for Kosilek’s sex change operation.
Kosilek first sued the Massachusetts’s DOC 12 years ago claiming he had trans-gender disorder. Wolf, according to an Associated Press article, is the first Federal judge to side with the defendant in a trans-gender case and order prison officials to provide a sex change.
Two years after Kosilek filed his first suit, Wolf ruled that he was entitled to treatment for his disorder, but stopped short of requiring sex change surgery. Kosilek sued again in 2005, arguing that the surgery was a medical necessity.
In his ruling early last week, Wolf ruled that surgery is the “only adequate treatment” for Kosilek’s “serious medical need.”
"The court finds that there is no less intrusive means to correct the prolonged violation of Kosilek's Eighth Amendment right to adequate medical care," Wolf wrote in his 126-page ruling.
Prison officials have repeatedly cited security risks in the case, saying that allowing her to have the surgery would make her a target for sexual assaults by other inmates. But Wolf ruled the DOC's security concerns are "either pretextual or can be dealt with by the DOC." It will be up to prison officials to decide what to do with Kosilek after the surgery.
But above and beyond that, it seems to me that Massachusetts is now in the business of providing its prisoners with sex change operations. Where does it stop? Insurance companies today would disallow such a request, I am certain, as being elective surgery and not a necessity.
Why in the world would he/she, who has been sentenced to life in prison, need a sex change? This case opens the door for numerous other ridiculous lawsuits from inmates. What will the Feds support next: face lifts, liposuction, and breast augmentation must be right around the corner.
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