I assure you, money does not magically appear. And a HUGE portion of insurance is covered by the government, state, and especially federal. Huge.
Plus, IVF costs $40k - $80k, sometimes more. You think insurance companies can just magically find this money. You want necessary services to be taken away from some people, and given to others?
Excuse me. You really need to read the comments not just emote. I have an unbroken stream of voting R for 55 years.
I do not want the Government to pay for IVF. I do not want the Government in healthcare AT ALL.
16 states require insurance companies selling in their state that offer policies covering pregnancy care to cover IVF. I think it would be possible to encourage the other states to do the same. The states have the right to dictate what coverage can be sold in their state.
I gave the figures in earlier posts that show that the cost for a family policy would rise minimally if IVF was included. The cost of the 2.5% of pregnancies that are due to IVF yearly would be spread among all of the family policies. Estimating 20-30K/IVF the cost woulld be <$30/policy. The insurance companies could negotiate large discounts as they do for every medical expense. That would drop the cost per policy even lower.
I think you are mixing apples & oranges. Fed Gvt covers medicare. Those folks are not having IVF. Medicaid folks are unlikely candidates for IVF as well. So the coverage would be through private insurance.
Think about the cost of a cardiac cath/bypass, an ICU stay, dialysis. IVF is nothing compared to those costs. The charges billed by hospitals to individuals are many times the charges negotiated by insurances, often less than 10% of sticker price. IVF is not different. When it is covered by insurance the amount paid is much lower than the sticker price paid by couples. Perhaps covering IVF by insurance seems a big deal at first but after analyzing what it would entail it is not.
No argument it’s expensive. But insurance companies are already covering these costs in 15 states (btw, California isn’t one of them)...and those insurers spread their costs across states they operate in whether they declare it to their policyholders or no. Also to be considered is the cost to the taxpayer of women who have no one to take care of them in their old age and end up on the dole, warehoused in state-funded care homes.
From what I learned in 5 minutes, about 1/4 million IVF attempts resulted in about 85,000 live births in 2020 or about 28% success rate after an average of 2.5 attempts. This is about the same survival rate of natural pregnancies. What I might suggest, is IVF be limited by age and marital status, say married under age 30. A woman would certainly know by that age whether she has physical or biological impediments to getting pregnant naturally that can’t be resolved any other way. Also, fertilizing and implanting one egg at a time would prevent the ethical issue of multiple fertilized eggs as well as the ethical issue of a fertilized egg, that is, life, languishing in cryo and slowly degrading over time which seems pretty morbid to me.