People aren’t sure about Donald Trump’s plan to get rid of out-of-pocket costs for in vitro fertilization. One experienced expert said it would fail as soon as it got to Congress.
Last Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee talked about his plan. He said, “Under the Trump administration, your government will pay for — or your insurance company will be required to pay for — all costs associated with IVF treatment.”
But in a note Tuesday, Kim Monk, a healthcare policy analyst at the research and forecasting firm Capital Alpha Partners, said that the plan “is dead on the Hill and raises a host of tricky policy and ethical issues for Republicans.” “Usually, Democrats like federal benefit mandates and costly program expansions, while Republicans point out how much these things cost and what they don’t mean to happen.”
Monk, who used to work for the Republican Senate, said that the issue could lead to higher taxes and insurance premiums for Americans, as well as the federal government having to pay more for new rules.
She also said that IVF can be a tough problem for Republicans who are worried about how to get rid of the embryos that are made during the treatment for infertility. That’s one reason why Republicans in the Senate earlier this year stopped a Democratic bill that would have made IVF available to everyone but didn’t require insurance to cover it, Monk wrote.
A political scientist also said that Democrats might bring up Trump’s past attempts to get rid of Obamacare and try to “goad him into supporting other costly mandates” because of his plan.
“Like progressives’ multibillion-dollar populist plans to make Medicare bigger, this plan is not likely to become law,” Monk said.
Democrats are criticizing Trump for his IVF plan because IVF doctors and patients are having a hard time since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that established a constitutional right to an abortion.
In response to his plan, Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said in a news release last Friday that “IVF is currently at risk because Donald Trump overturned Roe v. Wade.” They were talking about how Trump’s Supreme Court picks helped make that choice in 2022. In his speech last Thursday, Trump said that Democrats’ ads saying he’s against IVF are false because he’s “totally in favor of it.”
