Better Health Care Might Have Saved Jon and Kate

Were IVF coverage mandated, sextuplets may have been fewer
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 28, 2009 10:08 AM CDT
Better Health Care Might Have Saved Jon and Kate
The photo released by TLC shows the Gosselin family posing for a photo at a party to celebrate the sextuplets fifth birthday. Mom Kate is at left and dad Jon on the far right.   (AP Photo/TLC, Michael Pilla)

Could better health care coverage have saved Jon and Kate? Maybe, writes Liza Mundy in the Washington Post, explaining that the Gosselins opted for a cheaper fertility treatment in their quest for one more baby after having twins—and got six kids. Had their health insurer been required to pay for in vitro fertilization, "the most sophisticated, controlled, and expensive form of fertility treatment," they would have likely ended up with fewer children and a normal, reality-TV-free wedded life.

A mandate for insurers to pay for IVF might be tough to achieve, given the high costs of health care reform—but if women of child-bearing age were covered, it would mean “fewer high-order multiples, healthier children, less exhausted parents,” Mundy writes. Plus, “it would even the reproductive odds, giving middle-class and lower-income Americans access to treatment that is currently reserved for the well-off or the unusually well insured.”
(More Jon and Kate Plus 8 stories.)

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