A Health Podyssey

Health Affairs Editor-in-Chief Alan Weil interviews Landon Hughes, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, on his research regarding the health statuses of people who identify as transgender.

Show Notes

Recent reports suggest about six-tenths of a percent of the United States population, or 1.4 million people, identify as transgender. Transgender individuals are people whose personal and gender identity are different from the gender they were thought to be at birth.

Good information about the health status of this group has been hard to come by although research is growing. Some data come from Medicare, which is useful but not representative of the population as a whole.

Landon Hughes, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, joins A Health Podyssey to discuss a paper he and coauthors published in the September issue of Health Affairs describing the morbidity of privately-insured, transgender individuals as compared to cisgender people, or those whose personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.

Using insurance claims data from 2001 to 2019, Hughes and colleagues report that transgender people were at an overall greater risk for morbidity than their cisgender counterparts across a broad range of conditions.

If you like this interview, order the September issue of Health Affairs.

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What is A Health Podyssey?

Each week, Health Affairs Editor-in-Chief Alan Weil brings you in-depth conversations with leading researchers and influencers shaping the big ideas in health policy and the health care industry.

A Health Podyssey goes beyond the pages of the health policy journal Health Affairs to tell stories behind the research and share policy implications. Learn how academics and economists frame their research questions and journey to the intersection of health, health care, and policy. Health policy nerds rejoice! This podcast is for you.