Funding IVF
Ontario's health care system is already overburdened. OHIP has just about all it can handle in paying for all the required health needs of the province's population. Health care spending, in fact, takes up an enormous part of the provincial budget and the cost is growing. Just as the population is growing through immigration, and the elderly portion of the population growing as people inevitably age and live longer because of improved hospital-medical care.
Quebec announced a year ago that it would henceforth fund in-vitro fertilization for infertile couples wishing to conceive. As burdened as Ontario's system is, Quebec's is in even more desperate straits. But of all provincial authorities, Quebec's is the most given to social programs that disproportionately to the other provinces benefit their citizens. It does help, immensely in that regard, that Quebec is also the recipient of the greatest transfer of funds as a have-not province.
Now, it would appear that lobbying has successfully persuaded a whopping 75% of Ontarians that the Ontario Health Care Plan should fund IVF as well. Infertility is indeed a medical condition and for those who wish to have children a profoundly unhappy one. But having children is a personal choice that many people opt not to indulge in. Those who want to raise children have alternative means including adoption.
IVF procedures are costly, time-consuming and marginally successful. And people who pay for it themselves are inclined to have too many multiples because they have too many embryos "transferred", unwilling to 'waste' their opportunities for success. The resulting multiples are often health-plagued babies requiring medical intervention and hospital care, costly to the system.
The theory goes that if government (the taxpayer) pays for the IVF, those involved would agree to a single embryo being implanted, obviating the usual multiples that so often result, and giving birth to a healthy baby whose medical/hospital costs would be in the normal range. The expert panel that was called upon to render an opinion included fertility specialists who stand to gain in their professional life from an increase in business.
Would it not make infinitely more good sense for the province to publish guidelines that would be enforced by fines or closures of clinics, that would impose a limit of say two embryos to be transferred through in-vitro fertilization? That imposition of a limit of two is more than reasonable, given that no one reasonably wants triplets and quintuplets through the process, whose health will be impaired.
Clinics and patient groups had financial support from the manufacturers of fertility drugs, to enable them to strenuously -and obviously successfully - lobby for the province to pay the freight for their IVF regimen. The current Liberal-led government looks as though it is prepared to assent to adding IVF to procedures paid for out of OHIP.
This is the same OHIP that will not pay for fundamental tests for prostate cancer, for example, and many other tests vital to peoples' ongoing health, even though those tests are a minuscule fraction of the cost of anything as complex and expensive and fraught with concerns as IVF.
Quebec announced a year ago that it would henceforth fund in-vitro fertilization for infertile couples wishing to conceive. As burdened as Ontario's system is, Quebec's is in even more desperate straits. But of all provincial authorities, Quebec's is the most given to social programs that disproportionately to the other provinces benefit their citizens. It does help, immensely in that regard, that Quebec is also the recipient of the greatest transfer of funds as a have-not province.
Now, it would appear that lobbying has successfully persuaded a whopping 75% of Ontarians that the Ontario Health Care Plan should fund IVF as well. Infertility is indeed a medical condition and for those who wish to have children a profoundly unhappy one. But having children is a personal choice that many people opt not to indulge in. Those who want to raise children have alternative means including adoption.
IVF procedures are costly, time-consuming and marginally successful. And people who pay for it themselves are inclined to have too many multiples because they have too many embryos "transferred", unwilling to 'waste' their opportunities for success. The resulting multiples are often health-plagued babies requiring medical intervention and hospital care, costly to the system.
The theory goes that if government (the taxpayer) pays for the IVF, those involved would agree to a single embryo being implanted, obviating the usual multiples that so often result, and giving birth to a healthy baby whose medical/hospital costs would be in the normal range. The expert panel that was called upon to render an opinion included fertility specialists who stand to gain in their professional life from an increase in business.
Would it not make infinitely more good sense for the province to publish guidelines that would be enforced by fines or closures of clinics, that would impose a limit of say two embryos to be transferred through in-vitro fertilization? That imposition of a limit of two is more than reasonable, given that no one reasonably wants triplets and quintuplets through the process, whose health will be impaired.
Clinics and patient groups had financial support from the manufacturers of fertility drugs, to enable them to strenuously -and obviously successfully - lobby for the province to pay the freight for their IVF regimen. The current Liberal-led government looks as though it is prepared to assent to adding IVF to procedures paid for out of OHIP.
This is the same OHIP that will not pay for fundamental tests for prostate cancer, for example, and many other tests vital to peoples' ongoing health, even though those tests are a minuscule fraction of the cost of anything as complex and expensive and fraught with concerns as IVF.
posted by Pieface @ 6:55 PM
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