Allison Escolastico, a 30-year-old transgender woman, has wanted breast augmentation surgery for a decade. By 2019, she finally thought her insurance company, Aetna, would pay for it, only to find that it considered the procedure cosmetic, not medically necessary, and refused to cover it. “I knew from my case, it wasn’t cosmetic,” said Ms.
Escolastico, who contacted a lawyer after she lost her appeal last year. “I knew I had to fight for this,” she said. Ms. Escolastico’s surgery is now scheduled for February.
Working with the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, a nonprofit that advocates transgender rights, and Cohen Milstein Sellers and Toll, a large law firm that represents plaintiffs, she and a small group of trans women.