I find it very appalling that in an industry that is largely self-pay there are many deceitful clinics that advertise false pricing for IVF. A friend of mine who was using my same clinic and just beginning her fertility treatments challenged me when I said that my husband and I had spent easily $15,000 on our IVF cycle when all was said and done. She had recently attended her consultation when they told her (and gave her a packet of information) that said IVF was $8,000. My explanation was probably unnecessarily heated, but I remember feeling as though we had been mislead and wanted to make it clear that we spent well more than the original estimate.
We were told that services like ICSI and PGD were what bumped the price up and since we would probably not need those that we could expect the lower end of the range. We were also led to believe that medications would cost just about $2,000. I was on low dosages of medication and nothing that wasn’t typical and our medication expenses were more like $4,000. While we really didn’t end up using ICSI or PGD, there were still additional expenses that we were not told about upfront. They recommended a frozen sperm back-up in case of an accident or performance anxiety which increased that estimate. Because of mild anti-sperm antibodies they advised that we wash the sperm prior to fertilization, another added expense. The office visits, pre-requisite testing (that had to be done again at the clinic), pre-transfer monitoring and eventually pregnancy and ob visits were also not included. That doesn’t even take into account the purely elective cost enhances like cryo-preservation and storage or “emergency” monitoring if the procedure is successful.
I don’t maintain that these aren’t valid expenses or that the clinic is trying to upsell the cycle. Rather, I just wish that they would say at the outset that while the price of the IVF cycle (embryology, physician fees, surgery and anesthesia fees, etc.) is $8,000, the typical price is $12,000, $13,000, $15,000 – whatever that comes out to be. The clinics have financial departments and easy access to information and how much a patient pays out of pocket typically and can easily come up with an average number. I have since learned that the average IVF cycle in the United States is about $12,000 plus medications – which sounds a lot more accurate.
Once we committed to doing IVF and assessed our savings we were willing to do whatever it took to scrape up the money to make it happen, and so as the bills piled up throughout the process we just paid as we were told and chalked it up to poor preparation. It would have been a huge help to know beforehand that we were realistically looking at more than even our inflated for “what-ifs” number of about $10,000. Beware of low price advertisements or offers and similarly higher priced ones that don’t seem to include everything you might encounter. Do your research and make sure you know everything that the quoted price covers and everything that your insurance will actually pay for (mine would not cover anything performed at a fertility clinic). It just may be one less stress in the very stressful process if you know exactly what you are getting into!
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