According to Belkin, out of those transgender service members, just 188 will need transition-related healthcare in a particular year, which would lead to an annual expenditure of $5.6 million.
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“Actual costs could be lower than expected, because transition-related care has been proven to mitigate serious conditions including suicidality that, left untreated, impose costs on the military, and addressing symptoms might conceivably improve job performance as well”, Belkin writes of his estimates.
The military is continuing to weigh whether or not they will be allowing transgender members of the service to serve openly, which bring up all of the other details in what doing so would mean. As for now, the study estimated that 12,800 transgender people serve in the US armed forces. This would come down to roughly 22 cents per member per month, or 1/100 of a percent of the military’s $47.8 billion annual health care budget.
“This is possibly because many transgender women – those born male but identifying as female – seek to prove to themselves that they are not transgender by joining the military and trying to fit into its hypermasculine culture”, Belkin said.
It would not be too costly for the Department of Defense to cover the health care needs of transgender troops, said a report published on Wednesday. Belkin also underlined overall financial costs of such medical care for transgender personnel in the military would not take long because needed treatments are short.
“There are costs, in other words, of not providing transition-related care, due to potential medical and psychological consequences of its denial, paired with the requirement to live a closeted life”, he said in the report. The prospective healthcare costs have been the subject of scrutiny since Defense Secretary Ash Carter supported admitting openly transgender people into the military for the first time last month.
“Captain Sage Fox, U.S. Army Reserve at a American Civil Liberties Union meeting called ‘Perspectives on Transgender Military Service from Around the Globe” on 2014.
The estimated number of transgender personnel is double that of civilian employees, because transgender people are overrepresented in the military, according to Belkin. Though some peoples as renowned as presidential candidate Mike Huckabee criticized Carter’s decision we will have to wait to see where the story goes and whether it ends happy or tragic for the transgender community.
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In the research article, Belkin wrote, “Even if actual costs exceed these estimates on a per-capita basis for persons requiring care, the total cost of providing transition-related care will always have a negligible effect on the military health budget because of the small number treated and the cost savings that the provision of such care will yield”.
