Campaign Promise Broken? Trump Has No Plans to Mandate IVF Coverage

Donald Trump‘s White House is not pursuing a campaign promise to mandate health insurance pay for in vitro fertilization (IVF), even though he pledged to do so multiple times on the 2024 campaign trail, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

In order to mandate insurers pay for IVF treatments, it would require an act of Congress. Two sources with knowledge of internal White House discussions told the paper that the administration does not intend to ask legislators to draft a bill making IVF coverage mandatory. The paper’s sources also said that forcing insurers to cover IVF is also not in the administration’s plans.

The White House’s lack of action paints a stark contrast to the president’s campaign promises.

“I’m announcing today in a major statement that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for — or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for — all costs associated with IVF treatment,” Trump said on the campaign trail last August. “Because we want more babies, to put it nicely.”

“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump told NBC in an interview that same day. “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”

But Trump’s vague campaign pledges did not include a plan for how to achieve that goal.

“There were no details provided by Trump during the campaign as to how this would work, who would be eligible and how it would relate to health insurance coverage,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, told The Post.

Even if the Trump administration were to force insurers to pay for IVF coverage, the costs would be passed down to consumers through higher premiums.

“How do you do this without burdening health insurers? That’s the key question they’ve been wrestling with,” one of the people familiar with the discussions told The Post. “It appears for now that they’re not going to go there.”

In February, Trump signed an executive order that he claimed would expand access to IVF, acknowledging that it can cost between $12,000 to $25,000 per cycle, that it may take multiple cycles to result in a pregnancy, and that only a quarter of employers and a handful of states cover it in their health insurance plans.

The executive order requested a list of policy recommendations for “protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.” But the deadline passed without such a list being made public, though it was reportedly delivered to the White House in May.

“As exciting as the executive order was … it doesn’t have any actual actions in it,” TJ Farnsworth, president of Fertility Providers Alliance and the founder of a chain of fertility clinics, told NBC News shortly after the deadline.

For now, it looks like any actual actions to require IVF coverage are not forthcoming.

The White House does, however, plan to redirect funds from a long-standing federal program that helps low-income women access birth control and testing for sexually transmitted infections. Instead, those funds will go to an “infertility training center” that promotes “holistic” approaches to combatting infertility, like classes teaching women about their menstrual cycles.