Article By Steven Ertelt
A medical watchdog group is calling on federal investigators to examine whether Planned Parenthood is disguising office visits so that prescriptions of dangerous trans hormones for teens look like ordinary care — and so insurers, including taxpayers, keep paying for them.
Do No Harm asked the Health and Human Services inspector general on Sept. 22 to investigate Planned Parenthood and its affiliates over alleged miscoding tied to youth hormone treatment.
The group said the abortion business may be billing visits in ways that conceal what it calls “sex-rejecting” services and that allow private and government insurers to cover drugs that might otherwise be excluded.
A data broker hired by Do No Harm reviewed Planned Parenthood coding from 2015 to 2025 and found “a subset of approximately 800 patients from across the country for whom Planned Parenthood affiliates wrote between 1,100 and 1,200 prescriptions seemingly related to gender dysphoria while potentially failing to use the correct diagnosis codes for the associated office visit.”
Because government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and TRICARE pay only for care deemed “medically necessary,” Do No Harm alleged the coding could produce illegal reimbursement. It asked HHS to review the office-visit codes and to “determine whether and to what extent” those visits lead pharmacies to fill cross-sex hormone prescriptions later billed to the federal government.
The letter said some Planned Parenthood affiliates and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health have publicly discussed strategic coding to obtain coverage.
Do No Harm said its own review has limits “inherent in a private actor’s attempt to root out another private actor’s wrongdoing without any of the government’s tools.”
The complaint lands as Planned Parenthood’s gender-denying business has surged.
A Concerned Women for America review of 14 regional reports found more than a 40% increase in so-called “gender-affirming care,” visits and services from 2024 to 2025. Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawaii, Alaska, Indiana and Kentucky reported 24,295 such “services” in 2025, up from 13,432 the year before. Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio rose to 8,644 from 6,206. The Pasadena affiliate’s transgender-related visits jumped from 1,544 to 2,346.Planned Parenthood’s national report for that period folded the work into a broad “other procedures” category rather than detailing the rise in sex-change drugs.
In the same year the organization reported 434,450 abortions, an 8% increase.
“This is several years in a row now that this number has increased despite society for the most part turning it back and reversing course on a lot of this,” said Macy Petty, a legislative strategist for Concerned Women for America. “Planned Parenthood has found a way to continue this harmful and destructive business.”
President Penny Nance said the findings demand a cutoff of public money.
“Given these revelations, the federal government must stop giving taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood — we should not be funding this evil organization.”
Pro-life researchers say the financial incentive is obvious.
LifeNews previously reported that puberty blockers can cost $3,000 to $25,000 a year for as long as five years, compared with about $580 for an abortion pill and about $600 for a typical first-trimester surgical abortion. A Government Accountability Office estimate cited in that reporting put Planned Parenthood’s Medicare and Medicaid receipts at more than $1.5 billion from 2019 to 2021.
Unlike abortion, gender drugs are not automatically barred by the Hyde Amendment.
Mary Szoch of the Family Research Council said Planned Parenthood “is in the business of killing unborn children and sterilizing others.”
She said the organization provides “estrogen and anti-androgen hormone therapy; testosterone hormone therapy; and ‘puberty blockers’ that can sterilize teens with gender dysphoria,” and that “American taxpayers should not be forced to fund this titan of the culture of death and destruction.”
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., warned that Planned Parenthood “is positioned to supercharge its transgender agenda with taxpayer funding taken from the elderly and those in need.”
Do No Harm said the drugs carry “significant, often irreversible” risks and that evidence they safely or effectively treat gender dysphoria is “low to very low quality,” especially in children.
LifeNews reported that some affiliates limit hormones to adults 18 and older, while others in states such as California and Maryland provide cross-sex hormones to 16- and 17-year-olds with parental consent.The letter follows a broader federal crackdown.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January ending federal support for gender-transition care for minors and later called for legislation “permanently banning and criminalizing sex changes on children.”
An August HHS report, “Wolves in White Coats,” accused parts of the gender-medicine industry of pushing and profiting from what it called fraud and referred clinics and hospitals to the Justice Department and the inspector general.
On Sept. 18, NYU Langone Hospitals and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center agreed to end pediatric gender-affirming medical interventions for minors and pay $8.5 million and $950,000, respectively, to resolve Justice Department investigations.
HHS has not said whether it will open the inquiry Do No Harm requested.
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