Kaiser North California SRS surgeons? Who is Dr. Robert Anooshian?

[jodie88]

Ok so today my endocrinologist at Kaiser Permanente in Santa Clara sent my surgery referral to the transgender surgery team in Oakland. I am supposed to hear from them in a few days to get the planning process started for SRS.

Here is the deal though, there are only two doctors listed under the Kaiser Transgender Surgery team, one is a urologist (Dr. Carl Thomas) and the other is a plastic surgeon (Dr. Robert Anooshian). It doesn't specifically list which one does mtf srs and I cant seem to find any good info on either of these doctors. I can't find a single mention of a Dr. Carl Thomas and anything transgender or transexual related (only thing google turns up is the kaiser page I found his name on!!). And for Dr. Robert Anooshian the only info I can find are few pics of FTM top surgeries that he performed but nothing for MTF.

Does anyone have more info or resources on either of these doctors? I want to save as much money as I can during transition and I am broke as a joke so having insurance coverage for this would be great... however I would rather pay the money and go to a more well known doctor if either of these doctors produces bad results. I have seen SRS results that look like a gaping hole with scar tissue surrounding it and absolutely nothing like a human vagina. I am not really willing to risk this happening to me.

Any resources or reviews/stories you can point me to would be greatly appreciated.

[jodie88]

For those of you who actually care about this post (looks like 0) I found out today that Kaiser is actually sending patients to Dr. Toby Meltzer in Arizona.

[katiej]

I think the lack of responses shows how much we all know about the first two you mentioned.  But we all know Dr. Meltzer.

And how cool is it that your insurance is going to take care of you! 

[Brenda E]

I want your insurance so bad.

[yayapineda]

Do you know anything about Southern California Kaiser? I just started having coverage this month with them

[mrs izzy]

I would choose Meltzer over the others unless they can give reference of training and patient

[herekitten]

Jodie88 - Wow what a coincidence you wrote this. I am in Georgia and was looking at the healthcare.gov site for marketplace coverage and what it offers. I noticed that Kaiser has a transgender clinic in California but not much was mentioned with regard to surgeons. I have a call in to the Georgia Kaiser office to find out what, if any, transgender policies are in place. This was yesterday. I've not had a return call as of yet. I will call again today.

I've never heard of the first two doctors you mentioned. I have heard of Meltzer and there is a lot about him on the web and on this site.  As for Georgia, there is doctor totally unheard of to me, Dr. Fara Movagharnia in Atlanta. The wording on his site is out of the ordinary when referring to MtF transsexual.

When I spoke with the rep at healthcare.gov, she indicated that transgender care cannot be denied by any insurance carrier in the marketplace with no regard to how you registered your gender, but I do believe it is state specific because Humana Georgia will not cover anything sex specific (penis/scrotum) if you are registered as female.  I'm waiting to see how this pans out.

Please keep posting your experience with Kaiser.  I'm tracking.