Analysis: Trump's cynical bait-and-switch on IVF

CNN

17 hours ago

To hear President Donald Trump tell it, he wields an almost magical ability to lower Americans' health care costs. Yet that doesn't seem to extend to one area where he made explicit 2024 campaign promises: in vitro fertilization.
Just this weekend, Trump claimed he had lowered prescription drug costs as much as 1,500%. 'I don't mean 50%,' Trump clarified. 'I mean 14, 1,500%.'
This is obviously false and innumerate. You can't cut something more than 100%. It would mean drug companies were not only giving their drugs away for free, but actually paying people exorbitant sums to take them.
But the self-proclaimed 'father of IVF' appears to be an absentee dad.
His past vows to make the expensive and arduous IVF process 'free,' or at least require insurers to cover it, would fall under that seemingly magical umbrella as well, of course. But contrasting with his repeated pressure on drugmakers to lower costs — regardless of whether it's in his power to do so — Trump and his administration haven't done much of anything to make his IVF promises a reality. And it sounds like they've given up trying, to the extent they meant to pursue this policy in the first place.
Indeed, this looked a whole lot like a cynical pander during the 2024 campaign. And the administration's actions since then only seem to confirm it.
The Washington Post reported this weekend that the Trump administration has no actual plan to get insurers to cover IVF, more than six months into the new administration. The only concrete action Trump has taken on this front was back in February, when Trump instructed his domestic policy council to submit 'recommendations' on 'aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.' He gave it 90 days.
Those recommendations were due in mid-May. But there is still no word on what, if any, recommendations were produced, and the administration last week reportedly declined to comment on the situation.
Fast forward to today, and the White House is apparently waving the white flag on Trump's biggest IVF promise. White House officials reportedly blamed inaction on the fact that Trump can't legally do this on his own and would need Congress to pass a law.
But that's not exactly the kind of impediment that Trump usually respects. His first six-plus months back in the presidency are rife with attempts to take bold and legally dubious executive actions that challenge the courts to stop him and companies to defy him. That's even applied to health care specifically.
Just last week, Trump sent letters to 17 major pharmaceutical company CEOs giving them 60 days to comply with an executive order that sought to lower prescription drug prices — even as experts say he has no such authority.
Trump has also sought to squeeze drugmakers in other ways, including threatening tariffs on pharmaceutical imports.
But the White House hasn't engaged in those hardball tactics to make insurers cover IVF. Administration officials aren't putting any public pressure on Congress to pass the law it says it needs, either, and they don't even seem to want to talk about the situation.
And if that's the new reality, it was entirely predictable — and predicted.
It was almost exactly a year ago when Trump debuted this promise.
'The government is going to pay for [IVF], or we're going to get — we'll mandate your insurance company to pay for it, which is going to be great. We're going to do that,' Trump said in August 2024. 'We want to produce babies in this country, right?'
That's not a 'we'll try to make this happen' promise. That's a 'we're going to make this happen' promise.
By October, Trump had declared himself the 'father of IVF' (something his campaign later labeled a joke). And Vice President JD Vance at his 2024 debate declared that making IVF more 'accessible' was core to the GOP's health agenda.
Even at the time, though, many dismissed the promises as hot air. Trump and his campaign were dealing with political fallout from strict red-state abortion bans, some of which had imperiled IVF access and coverage. Rhetorically bear-hugging IVF, a practice that's widely popular with voters, made sense.
But free IVF or ubiquitous insurance coverage never seemed an especially serious idea. Not only are IVF costs very expensive, stretching into tens of thousands of dollars per treatment, but many anti-abortion conservatives are starkly opposed to it. The process involves producing embryos that are never used and are often destroyed, creating a moral quandary for anti-abortion blocs that believe life begins at conception.
The idea that a Republican administration would spearhead making that cheaper — or even making the government pay for the creation of later-discarded embryos — was always far-fetched.
Because of all of this, many Republican lawmakers strongly rejected Trump's proposal when he debuted it. Some even acknowledged that it appeared to be a rather transparent bit of pandering that was not to be taken seriously.
'People get emotional about an issue, so they decide to completely pander and go way over a position they never really supported because they're afraid people accuse them,' Conservative Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said at the time.
It appears that's precisely what happened here.
That's bad news for anybody who might have been counting on this proposal. These issues, after all, deal with one of the most heart-wrenching circumstances that many families will ever confront: problems conceiving children. The cost is prohibitive for many people.
An October Ipsos poll also showed many Americans supported the idea. They said by a 55-26% margin that Congress should pass a law requiring insurers to cover IVF.
The Washington Post back in February profiled a young woman who had heard Trump deliver the promise and reluctantly voted for him. When the White House in February announced its limited IVF recommendations, saying it was delivering on Trump's promises, she called it 'bullsh*t.'
It's getting more and more difficult to quibble with that summary.