Geri Stengel: What Fertility Coverage Buys and What It Doesn’t
Geri Stengel, President at Ventureneer, shared on LinkedIn:
“Even with full fertility coverage, three in four U.S. women with infertility never start IVF.
That figure comes from the full U.S. report of the IVI Institute Fertility Barometer, a GfK survey of 7,509 U.S. women.
It’s easy to read as coverage failing, but the same chart shows coverage working.
Among women who saw a doctor, 86% of those with full fertility coverage got some treatment, compared with 67% of women whose insurance didn’t cover fertility.
What coverage didn’t fix is what women don’t know.
One in five U.S. women who have experienced infertility can’t say whether their insurance covers fertility treatment at all.
More than one in four never saw a doctor.
And ‘no guarantee of success’ ranked almost as high as lack of insurance (37% vs. 39%) as a barrier to treatment.
Lynn Mason, CEO of Everleap Fertility, the U.S. network behind the report, was direct in her written answers to my questions: ‘Coverage alone doesn’t resolve those concerns.’
Thomas Molinaro, Everleap’s chief medical officer, went further for a clinic network: ‘The objective is not to direct every woman toward IVF.’
For employers, insurers and women’s health founders, the gap sits around the fertility clinic, not inside it: before the first appointment, in understanding the benefit, and in honest conversations about the odds.
That part of the market has drawn little capital.
PwC estimates consumer fertility companies received about $0.3 billion of the roughly $14.4 billion invested in fertility from 2020 to 2025.
My latest Substack looks at what fertility coverage buys, what it doesn’t, and who could build the front door to care.”
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