Within three months, an interdisciplinary group of health professionals from the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS) will have a protocol of therapeutic care for transgender people ready.
At the last session of the Board of Directors, it was agreed that the institution will offer hormonal and psychological treatment to transgender people, in order to avoid both physical and emotional complications.
For this reason, the Medical Management will have to conform this group of specialists. The institutional objective is to assess an approach to comprehensive care for these people.
When the protocol is ready, the officials will receive the training so that the population is taken care of in a timely manner.
José Luis Loría, director of the Board of Directors of the CCSS, stressed that this accompaniment will be offered to transsexual people who are properly insured in any of the modalities of insurance offered by the institution and estimates that about 100 patients would be able to receive this benefit.
Transsexuals have no link between their biological sex and their gender identity, which leads them to seek hormonal and even surgical therapies to change their sex. According to Loría, this often requires them to abuse drugs and put their lives at risk.
This decision motivated criticism from Mario Redondo, from the Christian Democratic Alliance, who indicated he is concerned for the course of the priorities of the institution.
According to Redondo, there are people in indigenous sites such as Grano de Oro or Alto Quetzal, who struggle to receive medical attention and the CCSS does not have the tools to give the minimum health conditions…
It is not appropriate that they are playing ideologically, irresponsibly and that the managers of the CCSS will compromise the resources of the institution to fund issues that are not determinant, not a priority and do not have the same urgency as the detection of cancer,”
said Redondo.