How Much Should an IVF Baby Cost?

What Price Would an Efficiently-Functioning Marketplace Place on IVF That Works

By now, my dozen or so regular readers know that my IVF addressable market calculations arrive at a 400 billion dollar marketplace to produce between 20 and 30 million babies per year, addressing not only infertility patients but also habitual pregnancy loss, genetic disease prevention, and proactive management for the mitigation of premature menopause from cancer treatment or loss of ovarian reserve due to normal aging.

(one of mine)

Part of this expansion of the IVF ecosystem originates in shifting the cost of cycles that do not result in a live birth away from the patients. This, in turn, encourages patients for whom either the risk-adjusted cost of having a baby through IVF is too high or the possibility of an unrecoverable loss of $10,000 or more for an unproductive cycle is unfathomable.

This shifting of risk, either to the treating clinic itself or to an outside financial institution with expertise in risk management, credit, and underwriting, becomes increasingly viable as pregnancy rates continue to rise, the number of accumulated cycles increases, and cycle outcomes become more predictable.

This better math, combined with improvements in the efficiency and cost needed to perform a cycle, produces a tipping point where a highly efficient and well-engineered IVF program attracts so many more patients when it shifts its business model from selling IVF cycles (which no one wants) to selling positive outcomes, in line with the solution the patients wish to purchase that it is both a patient-friendly decision and a good business decision.

This new dynamic assumes better data on which to base decisions and an IVF supply chain and expansion capacity sufficient to accommodate many more patients than the ecosystem can accommodate today. This, in turn, requires continued development of automation hardware, decision-support software, and care delivery enhancements to digest a quantum increase in the aggregate throughput of world IVF.

What is the business payoff for these system-wide innovations? How large can the current 25 billion dollar (about the size of the world potato chip industry or the annual revenue of the Heineken beer company — no disrespect intended) global IVF marketplace grow?

Calculating this means plugging in a best-guess price tag for a successful outcome. (pardon the crass-sounding language — I know as well as anyone that well-meaning fertility doctors don’t think for babies and families having price tags — I’m just trying to write clearly.)

And the number I plug in is $15,000, about half the price of a new car worldwide.

Most of these cars are bought to replace old vehicles.

This is a plug-in number based on little data but sufficient for this type of thought experiment (I gladly entertain different, possibly better assumptions.)

In my mind, a family or individual who seeks IVF is far more likely to want to spend $15,000 on a baby than a new car.

Knowing they are getting a baby, and not just a lottery ticket, gives them access to having a baby.

And multiplying this $15,000 by 20–30 million babies accounts for between 300 and 450 billion dollars — about the size of Volkswagen or CVS.