Lambda Legal, a broad coalition of LGBTQ groups, and Steptoe & Johnson LLP recently filed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ recently published health care discrimination rule that purports to carve out LGBTQ people and other vulnerable populations from the protections of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, among other bases. The lawsuit, Whitman-Walker Clinic v. HHS, is filed on behalf of Whitman-Walker Health, the TransLatin@ Coalition, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ Equality, AGLP: The Association of LGBTQ Psychiatrists, and four individual doctors.

This is not Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center’s first time suing the Trump administration. In 2019, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, represented by Lambda Legal, was a plaintiff in Santa Clara v. Azar to block the Trump Administration’s Denial-of-Care Rule. In response to the lawsuit, a District Court vacated the rule in its entirety in November 2019.

In 2016, the Obama administration finalized a rule implementing the nondiscrimination provisions of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Section 1557, that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, transgender status, or sex stereotypes as forms of sex discrimination. In May 2019, the Trump administration announced a proposed rule change designed to roll back these protections. The proposed rule would carve-out LGBTQ people from the Affordable Care Act’s nondiscrimination protections, and invite health care workers, doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies that receive federal funding to refuse to provide or cover health care services critical to the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ people, such as gender-affirming and reproductive care. The proposed rule would also limit the remedies available to people who face health disparities, limit the access to health care for people with limited English proficiency, and dramatically reduce the number of health care entities and insurance subject to the rule.

On June 19, HHS published the health care discrimination rule, which is scheduled to go into effect Aug. 18, 2020.