WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump proposed Thursday that in-vitro fertilization (IVF) be made free for wannabe parents — a sweeping pitch that could transfer as much as $7 billion in annual costs to the government and insurance companies, experts tell The Post.
The Trump team hasn’t specified how the policy would be adopted, but the quickest way is likely through pending legislation requiring insurance companies to consider infertility a covered medical condition or through amending former President Barack Obama’s signature 2010 healthcare law.
If Trump, 78, manages to become the 47th president, he could also issue executive orders expanding free IVF coverage to all federal workers, military members and veterans, who currently are eligible only in limited cases — though such orders would likely face legal challenges.
“Politicians promise and overpromise all the time,” Gerald Kominski, senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, told The Post Friday.
“In this specific case, what [Trump’s] promising has never been done with regard to healthcare in this country.”
The price tag for IVF is hefty — with treatments costing $15,000 to $20,000 per cycle, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Vanessa Brown Calder, the director of Opportunity and Family Policy Studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, estimated the cost of making IVF free to everyone would amount to roughly $7 billion per year — a calculation she said was based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reflecting 413,776 assisted reproductive technology (ART) cycles in 2021, 99% of which were IVF treatments.
“Of course, this substantially understates the true long-term costs of the program,” Calder cautioned.
“Most IVF patients are currently self-pay and this limits IVF use. Moreover, government-funded IVF would create new incentives for couples to delay childbearing or engage in elective fertility preservation, leading to growing use and reliance on fertility treatment long-term.”
It’s unclear how much of the total burden would be shouldered directly by the government — though increased costs for insurance companies are likely to be passed on to taxpayers as well though higher policy premiums.
‘A Dramatic Moment’
Advocates have been fighting for years to make IVF free — and were thrilled by Trump’s surprise announcement.
“It’s terrific that a nominee of a major party in this country is calling for universal access for IVF. That’s great, we applaud that,” said Sean Tipton, the chief advocacy and policy officer for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM).
“We would very much love to work with the Trump campaign on what that proposal might need to look like. So far the plan seems to consist of one sentence.”
Tipton added: “There’s an active bill sponsored by Republicans right now in Congress. He could say, ‘Let’s do that.’”
That legislation was introduced by Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.) and cosponsored by 14 House Republicans and six House Democrats, including New York GOPers Mike Lawler, Marcus Molinaro, Anthony D’Esposito, Brandon Williams and Andrew Garbarino as well as Empire State Democrats Dan Goldman and Patrick Ryan.
Tipton said the ASRM is interested in learning whether Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris also supports universal insurance coverage for IVF — after she has frequently invoked concern about safeguarding the procedure against state-level anti-abortion laws.
“Everyone can speak in platitudes,” he said. “Now it’s time to move past the poetry of supporting IVF and into the prose of what those policies would look like.”
Although efforts to get a federal IVF coverage mandate have gained little traction, 13 states — ranging from Republican bastions Arkansas and Utah to Democratic strongholds New York and Massachusetts already require insurance companies to cover it.
California, the most populous state in the union, is poised to follow after the state legislature approved a mandate this week.
If enacted, a free-IVF mandate would be a major bipartisan accomplishment for Trump, who in his first term similarly breathed new life into long-stalled criminal justice reforms, forcing through a bipartisan package known as the First Step Act after the policies languished for years.
“I’ve been in this policy space for 25 years and never has IVF and infertility treatments had this sort of attention from these very top level of politicians,” Tipton said. “So it is indeed a dramatic moment. And so now the job is to take all this interest and translate it into policies that actually provide coverage.”
About 2.5% of American babies are born from IVF each year — compared to 5% to 7% in European countries with free coverage for the procedure, he noted.
So far, state mandates haven’t led to a large bump in IVF babies, though more incremental increases may be resulting from them.
In response to criticism of the plan’s cost, Tipton told The Post opponents should look at the big picture.
“In order for the species to survive we have to have reproduction,” he said. “In order for our Social Security system to be fiscally viable, we have to have young employees paying taxes.
“You are in a society with those people and we need to have children.”
Mixed reactions from GOP loyalists
The Trump IVF plan got a range of reactions from Republicans, with some championing it as a bold pro-family initiative while others — especially abortion opponents —shared concerns due to IVF’s process of creating and destroying embryos
Even some close Trump allies privately said they were horrified at the idea, with one former White House official calling it “terrible,” before predicting the former president would not lose support from anti-abortion conservatives on Nov. 5.
The ex-aide said that the “inartful” plan “doesn’t change what he did and what he plans to do on life” — calling Trump “the most pro-life POTUS of our generation” after he appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022 and return abortion policy to the states.
The Trump initiative is expected to appeal not only to suburban centrists, but more Democratic-leaning voting groups, such as LGBT people who use IVF to conceive children.
“Affordable access to IVF is an important issue for the LGBT community across the political spectrum, and President Trump’s proposal would be a game changer for LGBT couples who want to start families of their own,” Log Cabin Republicans President Charles Moran said in a statement.
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a prominent anti-abortion organization, called for enacting policies that would stop embryos from being destroyed if Trump’s plan is adopted.
“SBA Pro-Life America has no objection to fertility treatments that help couples struggling with infertility in an ethical way, with strong medical safety standards,” said SBA president Marjorie Dannenfelser.
“We believe human embryos should not be destroyed. All too often, proposals on this issue go too far by giving blanket immunity to IVF clinics — even for rogue practitioners who switch human embryos, fail to follow basic safety standards, or negligently destroy human embryos desired by infertile couples,” she added.
Trump’s IVF plan followed months of Democratic candidates painting him as a potential threat to the procedure following the federalization of abortion policy, which resulted in court fights in some states over whether the practice constitutes abortion.
Alabama’s state supreme court in February issued a stunning ruling saying that embryos created using IVF must be considered “unborn children” — prompting the Republican-led state government to hastily ratify a new law in March that provided criminal immunity for providers and patients.
