What do you do if you’re running for President but nobody in your party seems to like you, leaving you at basically zero percent in the polls? That’s the problem facing NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio this month, but he’s clearly struck on a solution. Nearly all of his competitors are singing the praises of Medicare for All while also pandering to the LGBTQ community as hard as possible. Hizzoner decided this week to one-up them combining the two into a single, furthest left package. Let’s make sure that Medicare for All covers transgender surgery! (Free Beacon)

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio said Medicare for All should cover gender reassignment surgeries on Sunday. “Absolutely. We have to respect everyone’s medical needs,” de Blasio said at New York City’s pride parade, when asked if the procedure should be covered in a Medicare for All system, according to comments reported by the Daily Caller. “If someone needs a surgery to be full and to live their life fully — the idea is a health care system that actually serves everyone to the fullest, not a health care system that rations and causes people to struggle to get just a little health care.” Last week, fellow Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro said his health care plan would publicly fund abortions and argued for helping transgender individuals access abortion.

We’ve apparently reached the point where mainstream thinking inside the Democratic Party doesn’t even blink over policies such as this or find them even slightly controversial. But the fact is that there is plenty of controversy remaining.

For starters, even the doctors performing such “transitional” surgeries have been seeing an increase in the number of patients asking to have the surgery reversed. Many report feelings of isolation, depression and even suicidal thoughts after the reality of their new life sets in.

And speaking of suicides, that’s one part of the formula you rarely hear discussed in these debates. But in a report published by Psychology Today in March of this year, it was revealed that doctors studying clinical outcomes of transitional surgery found there were extensive problems. In one study, it was determined that, after gender reassignment surgery, patients have “considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.”

Other studies have indicated that the suicide rate among those who have had this surgery is as high as 20% above the general population. And yet these surgeries are being approved at an alarming rate. The medical community needs time to wrap their head around these questions, and demanding that such procedures be packed into a taxpayer-funded public Medicare plan certainly deserves more debate than it’s receiving here.