As promised, Josephine’s take on today’s talk… 

It’s always good to put things in perspective, and Debora Spar did that for the infertility business Thursday when she gave a talk at the University of Minnesota.

She’s the Harvard economist who wrote the book published last year called “The Baby Business,” who estimates that the infertility marketplace is worth about $3 billion.

Sounds like a lot, right? Well, her latest research is on the bottled water business and that’s worth about $58 billion.

Well, it might be small in the grand commercial scheme of things, but we are talking about babies here, and being parents.

She said that some things in this country could be better for infertile couples or single people who want be parents. For starters, health plans could view infertility as a medical problem, which it often is, and include it in their health coverage. They could set some parameters. For example, they don’t have to pay for a single, 53-year-old former cocaine addict to have twins. (She swears that’s a true case. Her health plan, which is required to cover infertility by Massachussetts law, paid for that woman to conceive twins via IVF.)  But what about a 27-year-old who can’t have children because her tubes are blocked?

She also said it might be a good idea to put payment caps on the price of egg donation, which has on rare occassions has reached $50,000 for so-called ivy league eggs. And Spar said she was struck by the fact that there are Ivy League eggs, but no Ivy League sperm that fetches a higher price than, say, Ernie’s who tends bar. Sperm is universally priced the same no matter who provides it. So why is that? 

She didn’t have an answer, but maybe you have some thoughts?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 4:48 pm and is filed under IVF, Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.