Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times,
When Texas Children's Hospital's "detransition clinic" opens in Houston, it will become the first facility of its kind, giving patients who regret life-altering procedures a chance at restorative care.
Illustration by The Epoch Times, Zereshk/CC BY-SA 3.0The facility, which has yet to announce an opening date, is part of an agreement with state and federal authorities to halt "gender-affirming care" at children's hospitals while offering help to those who transitioned medically.
A 10-page settlement term sheet, recently obtained by The Epoch Times through an open records request to the Texas attorney general's office, showed that services at the clinic will focus on multidisciplinary care.
Services are to include endocrinology, surgery, fertility counseling, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and speech pathology, among others.
In May and June, the Department of Justice (DOJ), along with the attorneys general of Texas and Ohio, secured settlements with large hospitals over allegations of fraudulent insurance billing practices related to "gender-affirming care" for children.
The hospitals denied wrongdoing in their billing practices or standards of care.
These agreements require the hospitals not only to cease transitioning procedures, but also to offer discounted or free restorative medical care to detransitioners.
Attorneys representing detransitioners and their clients praised the efforts of the DOJ and the states to assist those suffering from the consequences of life-altering medical changes.
Detransitioners are those who stopped or reversed a medical gender transition they started earlier in life.
'They Deserve Specialized Care'Mark Trammell, CEO of the Center for American Liberty, which represents several detransitioners, including Chloe Cole, told The Epoch Times that restorative care for detransitioners was an important step.
"The creation of these clinics is a recognition that detransitioners are real, their experiences matter, and they deserve specialized care," Trammell said in a text message.
Cole, who drew national attention after speaking out against subjecting children to gender-reassignment procedures such as hormones and surgeries, told The Epoch Times that healthcare for detransitioners was a long-needed win.
"The opening of Texas's detransition clinic and the funding being put into care for those of us who need it most will transform a sorely neglected area of healthcare," Cole said.
Cole, who was 15 when she received hormones and a double mastectomy that changed her life forever, said via text that it took five years to find medical professionals to help her.
When she decided to seek help, medical providers referred her back to the gender clinic that refused to address her needs, she said.
In Texas, attorney Josh Payne, founding partner of Campbell Miller Payne, which represents detransitioners, including Soren Aldaco, agreed that establishing a restorative care clinic was needed.
"Many detransitioners need specialized care for the rest of their lives to cope with the damage of lost body parts and the ability to function normally," Payne told The Epoch Times in an email.
"Some detransitioners may not want to return to health centers that harmed them in the first place. Hospitals like Texas Children's should establish a fund for victims to defray the costs of lifelong care and compensate them directly for their injuries."
Aldaco, a detransitioner whose fight to continue her medical malpractice lawsuit put her in the spotlight, won her appeal before the Texas Supreme Court on June 26.
By a unanimous decision, the Texas court reversed the dismissal of her lawsuit, ruling that the statute of limitations had not expired, meaning her medical malpractice case against her former therapist could proceed.
The statute of limitations for medical malpractice suits is two years in many cases, which is a major hurdle for many detransitioners.
Aldaco was 19 when she had her breasts removed.
"If you're a 13-year-old on puberty blockers, you might not realize you're infertile until you're 26 and you just got married, and you're trying to have kids," she told The Epoch Times in a February interview.
Aldaco's story is like those of many others who spent years "transitioning" as teenagers, only to change their minds later in life.
First-of-its-Kind ClinicUnder an agreement reached on May 15, Texas Children's Hospital, the largest pediatric hospital in the country, is set to create the nation's first detransition clinic.
In an email to The Epoch Times, the hospital declined to confirm an opening date or comment about the facility's future operation.
The Houston-based hospital will establish the detransition clinic to provide medical care to patients who received gender transitioning procedures through age 21, and obstetric-gynecology care for those over age 21, according to documents.
Additionally, the hospital will provide clinic services at no cost to patients for a period of five years.
Texas Children's will create and maintain an easily accessible landing page on its website describing the available services. The facility will be listed on the hospital's donation website, and the funds will support free detransitioning services beyond the initial five years of operation.
Also, the hospital will amend its bylaws to ensure swift dismissal for any physician who violates the state's prohibition on medical interventions aimed at transitioning minors.
The hospital will pay more than $10 million in damages and civil penalties to Texas and the federal government to resolve a three-year federal and state investigation into the hospital's alleged improper billing practices to the state's Medicaid program to transition children, according to a press release by the Texas attorney general from May.
Texas Children's agreed to permanently fire and revoke privileges for five "woke" doctors who performed harmful medical procedures on Texans, according to the release.
The hospital said in a May press release that it had agreed to a settlement "to protect [its] resources from endless and costly litigation."
"This settlement will allow us to redirect those precious resources to focus on the life-saving care and groundbreaking discoveries of our exceptional clinicians and scientists," the release said.
According to the Texas attorney general, Texas Children's billed Texas Medicaid for "unallowable and illegal 'gender-transition' interventions, including by using false diagnosis codes."
Nonetheless, the DOJ commended the hospital for its cooperation during the investigation and its commitment to providing care for detransitioners.
Prestigious Clinic AgreementOn June 5, the DOJ announced that the Cleveland Clinic, a renowned medical institution in Ohio, had reached a similar settlement with the federal government and the state.
The agreement requires the clinic to provide restorative care to detransitioners and prohibits the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries for minors for the next 20 years.
Like in Texas, the clinic was under investigation for allegedly falsifying billing to cover transgender procedures for minors. The Cleveland Clinic denied any wrongdoing, according to the government agreement.
As part of the settlement, the clinic will pay $308,000 in penalties and provide $2 million in restorative care for detransitioners who face financial barriers to such services.
The Department of Justice in Washington on Feb. 21, 2026. In May and June, the Justice Department, along with the attorneys general of Texas and Ohio, secured settlements with large hospitals over allegations of fraudulent insurance billing practices related to “gender-affirming care” for children. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times Tyler Durden Mon, 08/03/2026 - 18:25The price of artificial intelligence just printed a new low. DeepSeek's V4-Flash, officially released Friday, costs roughly three cents to run through a standard battery of benchmark tests, according to San Francisco research firm Artificial Analysis. Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 costs 86 cents; OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, $1.86; and Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, the industry's top-scoring model, $3.15. In realized terms, the Chinese model is more than 100 times cheaper to run than the American flagship, according to Reuters.
Sarah Rogers / MITTR | Photo GettyV4-Flash is the cheapest well-known model in the world, and by a wide margin. The figure is even more striking because of a detail buried in the firm's write-up: V4-Flash is unusually verbose. It consumes tokens heavily and still lands at three cents. The per-token price is doing all the work.
The same firm supplies the caveat. V4-Flash scores 50 out of 100 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a composite of nine benchmarks spanning coding, reasoning, and workplace tasks. That ties Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash and puts it one point behind Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 and Zhipu's GLM-5.2. Moonshot's Kimi K3 scores 57, while Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 and Fable 5, along with OpenAI's GPT-5.6, score at least nine points higher.
That said - V4-Flash kicks massive ass at routine tasks, but the frontier models still own the heavy lifting. In difficult, multi-step agentic work, small reliability gaps at each step compound into enormous end-to-end differences. Essentially that's the current state of play for frontier pricing. But for the routine volume that makes up most production traffic - summarization, boilerplate code, and back-office automation - V4-Flash is where it's at.
Chinese Knife FightV4-Flash's 3-cent print is the fourth shot in an 18-day barrage: China's AI labs are cutting each other for domestic share, and the fallout is repricing the model market everywhere else. On July 16, Moonshot shipped Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model that promptly took the number-one slot on Arena's Frontend Code leaderboard from Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. On July 19, Alibaba rushed a preview of Qwen3.8-Max onto the stage at the World AI Conference in Shanghai. There was no pricing, no model card, and its claim of ranking "second only to Fable 5" rested on Alibaba's internal evaluations.
On July 27, Moonshot answered by open-sourcing K3's full weights, the largest open-weight release in history. DeepSeek shipped V4-Flash on July 31. Then on August 3 - Monday, the same morning the Reuters story ran - Alibaba took Qwen3.8-Max to general availability: 2.4 trillion total parameters, 95 billion active parameters, a one-million-token context window, and flat pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, with no long-context surcharge.
Qwen's release promptly landed at No. 4 on the Frontend Code Arena with 1,668 points - one point behind Claude Opus 5 at high effort, eight behind Kimi K3, and ahead of both Fable 5 at 1,630 and GPT-5.6 Sol at 1,620. Of the five models Arena identifies on the cost-performance Pareto frontier, four are Chinese: Kimi K3, Qwen3.8-Max, GLM-5.2, and V4-Flash. The lone American entry, Opus 5, occupies the expensive tip, defended by 37 Elo points.
Qwen3.8-Max by @Alibaba_Qwen has reshaped the cost-performance Pareto frontier in Frontend Code Arena, with pricing of $2 per input MToken and $6 per output MToken.
Top models on the Pareto frontier:
- Claude-Opus-5
- Kimi-K3
- Qwen3.8-Max
- GLM-5.2
- DeepSeek-V4-Flash
Congrats… https://t.co/3S4tW1KmlI pic.twitter.com/CiWU7Hh4BD
Alibaba's own benchmark table is more candid. Qwen3.8-Max edges Fable 5 and Opus 4.8 on Terminal-Bench, 86.6 to 84.6, while trailing badly on hard repository engineering: it scores 67.7 on SWE-bench Pro against Fable 5's 80.0. The preference-judged coding moat is gone. The deep-engineering moat remains intact - for now.
All of this raises a more basic question: who is paying for three-cent inference?
Until this spring, DeepSeek had never taken outside money. Founder Liang Wenfeng bankrolled the company through his quant fund, High-Flyer. In late May, DeepSeek closed its first external round - more than 50 billion yuan, or roughly $7.4 billion, at a valuation above $50 billion - as first reported by The Information.
The round's structure is unusual. Commercial investors, reportedly led by Tencent and CATL, bought into a limited partnership controlled by Liang, with no voting rights and a five-year lockup. Exactly one party received direct equity and a vote: China's state-backed National AI Industry Investment Fund. Within weeks, DeepSeek was in talks for a follow-on round at roughly $71 billion, with proceeds earmarked for data centers and chips.
Add the 75% API discount the company made permanent earlier this year, and the arrangement begins to resemble industrial policy conducted through an API: state-privileged capital underwriting below-cost tokens to capture global share. It is working: in June, DeepSeek accounted for nearly 23% of the tens of trillions of tokens flowing through Vercel's enterprise AI gateway, compared with Anthropic's 32%.
Meanwhile...As we (and now Wall Street) have been noting, the Token Expenditure Index - a usage-weighted average of what the market pays per million tokens, blended across frontier APIs and open-weight platforms - peaked above 2.0 in May after nearly doubling from its December launch, and is now slip sliding lower.
Strategist Andreas Steno Larsen called it the one everyone should be watching, warning that sustained weakness in token pricing would end the memory, hardware, and data-center trades for this cycle. The index last printed 1.3394, roughly a third below its May high. Bloomberg flagged the rollover in early July as evidence that AI vendors were losing pricing power with increasingly cost-sensitive customers; Silicon Data's own commentary interpreted it as usage drifting back toward open-weight models.
Also relevant - the pushback to data centers amid a capex boom running north of $700 billion. As we reported last month, from the nationwide July 18 protests organized by Tea Party veteran Amy Kremer's Humans First to the widening fracture inside the Republican coalition over land, water, and power - domestic politics has entered the chat, something Beijing doesn't have to deal with - so now they've got a three-cent benchmark financed on terms no Western lab can match. Through open-weight releases, it is also portable onto American silicon, where US inference providers will happily serve Chinese models at commodity margins. Export controls cannot contain a set of weights on the torrent.
The model to watch is V4-Pro, the heavier system DeepSeek has confirmed without naming a release date. Flash at three cents pressures the budget tiers at OpenAI and Google. If Pro lands anywhere near frontier scores at DeepSeek prices, the last 37 Elo points - and the frontier premium that OpenAI and Anthropic both charge to underwrite the buildout - will be directly in play.
Tyler Durden Mon, 08/03/2026 - 18:20In a development that will stun absolutely no one, the California Democratic Party's roughly 380-member executive board gathered at a waterside Sheraton in San Diego this weekend and voted to endorse Proposition 40 - a "one-time" 5% levy on the net worth of the state's roughly 200 billionaires - clearing the 60% supermajority required for the party's official blessing, three months before voters render judgment on November 3.
A large banner is seen at a campaign event for a proposed "billionaire tax" in Los Angeles on Feb. 18, 2026. | Jae C. Hong/APIf it passes - California residents on January 1, 2026 whose net worth is $1 billion or more on December 31, 2026, will owe Sacramento a nickel on every dollar. Directly held real estate is largely excluded - which means the drafters carved out the one asset class that cannot board a Gulfstream. The measure originated with a major healthcare union, the Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), which claims it would raise $100 billion to offset what it calls deep healthcare funding cuts under the Trump administration. Progressive lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna, have cheered it on. SEIU says it will raise about $100 billion, mostly to backfill federal healthcare cuts, with some crumbs earmarked for education and food assistance.
The arithmetic: $100 billion at a 5% rate assumes roughly $2 trillion in billionaire net worth sitting obediently in Atherton and Bel Air through year-end, marked to market and liquid enough to cut nine- and ten-figure checks to the Franchise Tax Board.
“I strongly support the grassroots effort in California to impose a 5% wealth tax on 200 billionaires worth $2 trillion,” Sanders said of the tax. “This is a model that should be emulated around the country, which is why I will soon be introducing a national wealth tax on billionaires.”
Yes: We need a wealth tax on billionaires. pic.twitter.com/2OUwSos5De
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 30, 2025The weekend itself was democracy at its most catered. The union threw a hospitality suite and handed out hats and T-shirts celebrating the confiscation of other people's balance sheets, while the "No on Prop 40" campaign - whose ranks include the California Medical Association (yes, the doctors oppose the measure written to fund them, calling a one-shot levy a flawed answer to a recurring hole), though its real bankroll is one Google co-founder, of whom more below - reportedly picked up around $7,000 in hotel rooms and travel for select board members via a hired consulting shop. Both sides whipped votes like the leveraged proxy fight it effectively was.
Afterward, the union's president declared that the endorsement settles the question of Democratic unity on the measure. Sure - minus the sitting Democratic governor, the party's own candidate to replace him, the California Teachers Association, and the state's firefighters. When even the teachers' union calls a tax too much, that tells you something.
Gavin Newsom - a man who never met a revenue stream he didn't like until it threatened his 2028 ambitions - has suddenly discovered the Laffer curve, warning that the state's largest taxpayers might simply leave.
After the measure qualified in June, he and his allies leaned on the union to pull it. The union's counteroffers tell you everything about the shelf life of "one-time": days before the June 25 withdrawal deadline, it publicly offered to swap the 5% levy for a 2% version Newsom would push through the Legislature - he passed - and, per the LA Times, union chief Dave Regan separately offered in private negotiations to pull the measure outright in exchange for help securing union contracts at several medical facilities - a demand he denies making. The temporary tax was, from birth, a down payment. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna cheer from the sidelines - neither of whom, we note, will be writing a check. Newsom, for his part, now stumps for a federal wealth tax - one billionaires can't dodge by moving - which concedes the entire case against this one.
In May, one of the co-authors of California’s controversial tax appeared to suggest that the levy could extend beyond a single imposition. Marxist economics professor Emmanuel Saez, who hails from France, made the comment during a heated debate against economist Arthur Laffer at the University of California, Berkeley
“I don’t think it’s going to be a one-time tax. Because you can’t surprise billionaires more than once,” Saez said. "Even then, maybe some of them were expecting something like this. So, it’s going to be a debate about this time, you know, a permanent wealth tax at a low rate that’s going to last for a number of years.”
How These Taxes Usually EndDo these people ever learn? Recall New Jersey circa 2016, when a single hedge fund manager's change of address to Florida had Trenton's budget officials publicly sweating over the state's revenue forecast - one guy, one moving truck, one fiscal panic. Recall Illinois' richest resident, Ken Griffin, packing his entire firm off from Chicago to Miami in 2022, taking what was reportedly the state's largest individual tax bill with him. Recall the Pacific Northwest's most famous ex-resident developing a sudden fondness for South Florida in 2023, mere months after Washington's shiny new capital gains tax survived its court challenge - and then unloading billions in stock from the comfort of a state that taxes none of it. Recall the world's richest man decamping California for Texas in 2020, with his companies trailing behind like ducklings.
And it's not just an American genre. Norway hiked its wealth tax in 2022 and promptly watched a procession of its wealthiest citizens establish residency in Switzerland. France ran the grand experiment for decades, bleeding tens of thousands of millionaires across its borders, until Macron finally euthanized the ISF - preserving, in the ultimate irony, a wealth tax on real estate alone, the one thing that couldn't flee. Prop 40's drafters studied that lesson and inverted it: exempt the immovable, tax the mobile.
California, of course, has been talking itself into this outcome for years - the 2023 wealth-tax bill with its infamous reach-back provisions for former residents died in committee, but the memo was received loud and clear in Austin, Miami, and Incline Village. The state lost a congressional seat after the 2020 census for the first time in its history, net domestic outmigration has been running for years, and the top 1% already supply north of 40% of state income tax collections. The geese aren't just laying the golden eggs; they're carrying the farm.
About that Incline Village entry: Sergey Brin decamped to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe last year - safely ahead of the January 1 snapshot - and has since pumped roughly $82 million into the No side's war chest, a committee called Building a Better California that has raised north of $118 million from fewer than a dozen donors, with Peter Thiel dropping a separate $3 million on the California Business Roundtable, the lobby anchoring the institutional opposition. Nor did Brin leave alone: at least six billionaires got out before the residency date locked, clipping an estimated $27 billion off the projected haul before a single ballot was printed. Every anecdote in the genre now has a live, hometown edition - the man whose fortune was minted in Mountain View is bankrolling the fight against a California tax he has already arranged not to owe.
The trap already snapped shut: because residency was fixed on January 1, 2026, leaving now won't dodge this levy if it passes - that trap closed eight months ago. What leaving now does is guarantee you're not around for the sequel. So expect a December blizzard of trust restructurings, charitable pledges, and valuation disputes over illiquid private stakes, followed by a constitutional bar brawl that keeps white-shoe litigators billing well into the 2030s. Collecting 5% of a private company position from a founder newly domiciled in Texas will be a spectacle.
Polling shows a strong majority of California Democrats on board and a narrower majority of the overall electorate - which is to say, this thing can absolutely pass. The No campaign calls the measure "bad for our budget, bad for our economy and bad for our future."
Tyler Durden Mon, 08/03/2026 - 18:00