Last Thursday, the Obama administration hosted the first White House LGBT Conference on Health in Philadelphia, which drew more than 300 guests from some 22 states.
Among the day’s speakers were Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and John Berry, the director of the Office of Personnel Management and the highest openly LGBT government appointee.
In her speech, Sebelius detailed the administration’s efforts to further LGBT equality and rights, including those related to health issues and in other departments such as the repeal of the ban on gay and lesbian servicemembers, the Department of Justice decision not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, enacting hate-crimes legislation and ending the HIV travel ban.
In addition to the president’s memorandum on visitation rights, which prevents hospitals receiving Medicare/Medicaid funding from barring same-sex partners from visitation, Sebelius noted five areas of the Affordable Care Act that benefit LGBTs.
These include protecting LGBTs from abuse from insurance companies by outlawing the practice of rescinding policies because of technical mistakes and banning a lifetime coverage limit; ensuring free preventative care and immediately outlawing the practice of denying children policies because of pre-existing conditions; ensuring transparency in health-care coverage, including a new online tool to allow LGBTs to search for insurance companies that offer benefits for same-sex partners; investments in the health-care workforce; and collection and integration of data on sexual orientation and gender identity in national health surveys.
Other administration accomplishments impacting the LGBT community, Sebelius noted, were the first White House conference on bullying, the White House HIV/AIDS Strategy and a $250,000 grant to Boston’s Fenway Institute to develop training for community health centers nationwide to better care for LGBT patients.
Sebelius also acknowledged that the president had directed every agency to ensure its policies were as fully LGBT inclusive as legally possible.
More personal was the speech given by OPM director Berry. He hit upon some of the same accomplishments Sebelius covered later that morning, as well as the recent rule adopted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that includes LGBTs in its discrimination protections. At his agency — which sets human resources policies for all federal agencies — Berry directed staff to update relevant regulations to provide benefits to LGBTs as best as can be done by law, including providing gender-appropriate health care for transgender employees.
Berry also talked about his friendship with the late activist Frank Kameny — who was fired by one of Berry’s predecessors from the U.S. Army Map Service in 1957 because he was gay. Kameny sued, and eventually the government adopted a policy that sexual orientation could not be used as grounds for termination or denial of a security clearance — clearing the way for Berry to hold his current position.