The U.S. military's Tricare health care system now covers transgender military family members and retirees, despite the official policy not yet going live, a top official said. "I'm not going to wait for the final policy," Navy Vice Adm. Raquel Bono, head of the Defense Health Agency, said in a wide-ranging interview with Military.com on Thursday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. "We're going to go ahead and do that because that's what our patients need," she said. The policy, published for public comment in the Federal Register in February, will allow for hormone therapy and mental health counseling for "gender dysphoria," the clinical term for those who identify as a different gender than the sex they were assigned at birth. Tricare is prohibited by law from covering sex-change surgery.
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