two more hospitals stopped treating trans kids and paid $9.45 million on the way out. neither admits doing anything wrong.

via the U.S. Department of Justice and Law Dork.

$9.45 million, and nobody did anything wrong. That is the official position of every single party to this.

On Friday the Justice Department announced that NYU Langone Health and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have both signed agreements to stop giving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery to anyone under 18. NYU Langone is paying $8.5 million. UPMC is paying $950,000. The department's own release says the claims it just resolved "are allegations only, and there has been no determination of liability," and that both systems "expressly denied all allegations."

Attorney General Todd Blanche put it this way: "hospitals that target children in these practices and then fraudulently obtain payment for the procedures will be held to account."

what the hospitals agreed to

Neither one is calling it a surrender, and both statements repay a slow read.

NYU Langone said it "has not entered into this settlement because of any wrongdoing and has affirmatively denied any wrongdoing or liability in the agreement," and that the resolution is "in the best interests of our patients and their families, protecting them as well as our providers and the institution from prolonged litigation." UPMC said its deal "protects patient and family privacy, preserves the confidentiality of sensitive health information, and resolves a matter principally involving certain alleged gender-affirming care billing practices."

Both of those sentences are about what the hospital has been protected from. Neither is about what the patients get now, which is nothing.

this is the sixth one

The legal theory here is paperwork. The release leans on the False Claims Act, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and allegedly false diagnosis codes, which is how you go after a form of medicine you cannot outlaw federally: you do not argue about whether it works, you argue about the billing.

NYU Langone and UPMC are the fifth and sixth providers to sign one of these since mid-May, following Texas Children's Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, Connecticut Children's and Mount Sinai, which beat the DOJ in court twice and handed the kids over anyway. Chris Geidner, who has tracked every one of them, flags the thing that separates this from a hospital quietly winding a clinic down: these are signed agreements. Reopening means breaking one.

The department has also moved the investigation to the Northern District of Texas, which is not where either of these hospitals is.