Whistleblower faces federal charges after exposing alleged continuation of gender-affirming care at Texas Children’s Hospital
Houston surgeon Eithan Haim is charged with four counts of criminal HIPAA violations. Lucio Vasquez
| Posted on June 10, 2024, 5:04 PM
A whistleblower is facing federal charges after sharing documents that allegedly exposed a Houston hospital for providing gender-affirming care to minors after Texas officials equated the medical practice to child abuse.
Houston surgeon Eithan Haim is charged with four counts of criminal HIPAA violations after leaking internal documents that allegedly showed that Texas Children’s Hospital continued to provide gender-affirming services to minors after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion in 2022 stating gender-affirming care was a form of child abuse.
“Our client is a mandatory reporter of child abuse who reported as a whistleblower to the State of Texas what he had seen in his hospital,” said Marcella Burke, Haim’s attorney. “It is our opinion that this is the government going out of its way to prosecute a whistleblower.”
In May 2023, Haim shared the documents with Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Now, the U.S. Department of Justice is accusing Haim of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which was passed with the aim of protecting patient health information. However, according to Rufo, the documents provided by Haim contained no information that “identified any individual.”
“All the documents were, in fact, carefully redacted,” Rufos wrote on June 6.
Just days after Rufo received the documents, Paxton launched an investigation into the hospital for “actively engaging in illegal behavior” by providing gender-affirming care to minors. On Monday, Paxton’s office didn’t confirm whether that investigation was still active.
In an interview with Fox News last week, Haim said he believed the charges were “politically motivated” because of the federal government’s “commitment to the transgender ideology.”
Houston Public Media reached out to Haim, although he didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Gender-affirming care in Texas
In February 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents who sought gender-affirming care for their children shortly after Paxton issued his opinion on the practice. An attorney general opinion is an interpretation of existing law, and cannot create “new provisions in the law or correct unintended, undesirable effects of the law,” according to the Texas AG’s website.
About a month later, Texas Children’s Hospital announced that the hospital would pause gender-affirming services for minors.
“This step was taken to safeguard our healthcare professionals and impacted families from potential criminal legal ramifications,” the hospital said in a 2022 statement.
However, according to Haim, the hospital secretly continued to provide gender-affirming care to children throughout the following year.
“Over the next year, the frequency of these procedures increased, and potentially hundreds more children received hormone interventions for gender dysphoria,” Haim wrote earlier this year.
This allegedly continued up until Senate Bill 14 went into effect last September. The law prohibits Texans under the age of 18 from accessing medical treatments like puberty blockers, hormone therapies and surgeries. Texas Children’s CEO Mark Wallace said the hospital would completely stop providing gender-affirming care to obey the new law.
Texas Children’s Hospital did not respond to a request for comment.
Moving forward
Haim’s attorneys sent a letter to U.S. Congress members in January to raise concerns over the “conduct of this investigation against a whistleblower,” claiming the investigation “was premised on an easily disproved falsehood.”
Despite the letter, the charges against Haim remain. According to Burke, they haven’t seen the federal indictment because it’s currently sealed.
As of now, they’re “in the dark of the basis for the charges against” Haim.
“We have asked the government to see the indictment, and the government has yet to produce it,” Burke said.
The U.S. Department of Justice didn’t respond to a request for comment. More details are expected to be revealed during an arraignment hearing in Houston scheduled for June 17.
“My client is anxious to get to trial to get his side of the story told,” Burke said. “I am confident this will result in the correct decision being made.”
Newsessentials Blog 
Posted on June 13, 2024
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