Fertility Coverage: A Benefit For Everyone

Meeting evolving employee expectations

Benefits professionals understand better than just about anyone else how important it is to keep up with the times. Employee expectations are constantly evolving, and a benefit that is seen as niche (or even unheard of) may become a necessity if companies hope to attract and retain the top talent. Just three years ago, telecommuting was seen as a luxury for most employees, but after Covid, many employees aren’t willing to go back to a full-time in-office mode of work. 

This evolution of employee expectations is especially true in the case of fertility treatment. Once seen as a private matter - and even stigmatized in the workplace - support to help employees form and grow their families was not seen as a benefit that employers should provide. Not only did many companies not fully understand their opportunity to help employees expand their families, but benefits professionals also worried that requiring such coverage might actually drive up their own healthcare costs.

Even as some workplaces began offering fertility coverage, these benefits were only extended to married female employees or the wives of male employees. Help was often not available to single mothers, single fathers, same sex couples, or others outside the so-called “traditional” family unit. Yet without access to the same benefits as everyone else, talented employees in these categories can be difficult to recruit and retain. 

Thankfully, changing employee expectations, the adaptability of benefits teams, and the ingenuity of fertility healthcare providers have now made family-forming benefits more widely available. As the conversation about employee healthcare has shifted, benefits such as fertility treatments have become more common with progressive companies looking to hire and retain the best talent they can. These employers acknowledge work-life balance as a premium and inseparable part of a comprehensive benefits package. In many cases, employees whose workplaces do not provide the benefits they need to start a family may look for other employers who do. 

This has inspired benefits professionals to find creative ways to incorporate fertility treatments into competitive benefits packages, as well as to broaden the way they think about these programs. For example, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and egg-freezing were once the primary fertility treatments available. While important, these procedures do not meet the needs of cisgendered males with fertility challenges, some trans patients, or male same-sex couples. Even then, company insurance policies can sometimes deny coverage for such procedures without proof of an infertility diagnosis, resulting in some employees not getting the care they need.

The need for reasonable costs both for the individual employee and company remains a major factor when selecting fertility coverage programs. Benefits teams are best advised to choose a fertility care program that is modular and activates on a per-employee use basis. In programs like this, the company only pays for those benefits used by individual employees based on their family-forming needs, rather than adding to their overall insurance costs. 

Today’s top employees demand a company culture that cares about more than just the work they do. By remaining flexible and considering the needs of employees, benefits teams can ensure they hire and retain the best staff, while conveying to their entire workforce how important their families are to the organization. 

Dr. G. David Adamson MD, FRCSC, FACOG, FACS, is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of ARC Fertility. He is a globally recognized reproductive endocrinologist and surgeon, and is a Clinical Professor, ACF at Stanford University, and Associate Clinical Professor at UCSF. Dr. Adamson also serves as the current Chair of the International Committee Monitoring ART (ICMART), a WHO NSA/NGO.