IVF lottery hits the headlines

I almost choked on my coffee and croissants when I read the Sunday Times this morning.  Couples are being invited to enter a lottery to have some ultra-expensive IVF.  I suppose it is  slightly better than IVF on the NHS – because I am not sure that we should be seeing our taxes spent on people having children when NICE are in the business of denying sick people a chance of life because of cost.

I was surprised to see that infertility is such a problem.  It seems that as many as one in six couples are having trouble conceiving.  This strikes me as extraordinary when we have it drummed into us from an early age about the importance of contraception.

But back to IVF.  How can it be a panacea for so many childless couples?  Surely the first port of call is education.  Because apparently a woman can only conceive for about 3 or 4 days every month.  So it follows that for over 3 weeks of every monthly cycle there is nothing much you can do – and there is nothing to get stressed and worried about – until next time.

Now admittedly I am not a doctor – but the key to couples having babies is surely to know and understand their cycles.  As one of the key problems associated with infertility is an irregular cycle – then simply knowing when ovulation occurs is a big step forward – because you can plan your love life around when there is trhe best chance of conception.

Last year there was a real breakthrough in home fertility monitoring by some scientists from the University of Cambridge.  Now their invention is on the market – DuoFertility.  Not only can DuoFertility  predict fertile days simply and accurately, it is backed with a comprehensive fertility expert support programme.  This means you not only have the most advanced and accurate monitor on the market – you have the reassurance of  having your own team of highly qualified fertility experts.

I see from the newspapers that DuoFertility is at least as effective as IVF at 1/10^th of the price.  To my mind that is a better deal than an IVF lottery.

Health insurance is not in good health

Insurance is one of those things you don’t need until you needed it. Then, maybe, if you are lucky, you’ll be glad you got it.   And then you might find there is something in the small print that suggests payment is not an option.  Nowhere is this more of a problem than with life insurance protection.  You have to make sure you die of something not mentioned in the small print.

It doesn’t get any easier when choosing health insurance.  The first problem is deciding where to go – assuming you are thinking of buying health insurance for yourself.  Most of us have heard of BUPA health – but tapping private health insurance into Google soon reveals other companies such as Zurich health cover – and the question is, what to do they offer?

Maybe the first question is to decide if you want medical health insurance or family health insurance.  I guess it depends if you have a family or not.  But if you feel you need health insurance – then you don’t have much faith in the NHS.

The NHS is one of this country’s sacred cows.  We’re supposed to feel proud of it and ignore the fact that funding issues mean the best treatments in virtually every treatment area are not given to you.

If you have osteoarthritis your doctor is instructed to offer you paracetamol as a first line treatment.  And god help you if you have something really nasty like Kidney cancer.

Need IVF?  Well, maybe, if you are lucky the NHS will offer you one course of treatment.  But strangely a breakthrough fertility monitor such as Duofertility is not even recognised by the NICE guidelines. Granted it costs around £500, which is not exactly cheap… but that’s one tenth of the course of a single course of IVF.

Like everything else the NHS is target driven – and only a few conditions are considered worthy of priority.  Breast cancer is worth a few votes…but not so much kidney cancer.  Heart disease is a priority – but maybe not prostate cancer.   And hey – don’t even mention Dementia.

Dementia is a bit of a problem – but not if you pretend it is a social issue.  Even better you can make dementia sufferers pay for their medical care right down to selling their own homes.  And if you know someone in your family who has dementia I bet you already don’t think very much of the NHS.  But here’s the rub…. Health insurance won’t be much help to you either.  Just check the small print.

Children are a Costly Business

What do you get for £200,000 nowadays?   Not a lot it seems as this is allegedly the price of having a child nowadays.   I am not quite sure just how they arrived at such an eye-watering figure – but presumably it doesn’t include designer baby wear or champagne instead of baby milk.

All of which got me wondering why is it that some people are so determined to have children.  We spend all our teenage years being urged to ‘be careful’  - then apparently millions of us then spontaneously suffer fertility problems when we try and have a baby.  Now we are told one in six couples have difficulty conceiving.  Although I suppose on the plus side striving for a baby does have its moments.

All of which brings me to the tricky subject of IVF. It costs £5000 for one course – and involves all sort of unpleasant procedures.  Up to three courses are necessary for success apparently.  Yet the NHS only funds one treatment.  Which kind of suggests either the NHS is a heartless organisation.  Or the government has decided that the NHS is not here to provide babies.

But if IVF is so unpleasant, why are there so many couples queuing up at private infertility clinics to pay through the nose for treatment?   Maybe they haven’t heard of the answer to fertility problems called Duofertility that was in the news recently.

Duofertility is the brainchild of a group of Cambridge University scientists – and is so effective that they promise to refund your money if you don’t get pregnant in one year.  Interestingly Duofertility is also proving to be at least as effective as IVF for couples experiencing  real difficulty in conceiving at a tenth of the cost.

As Duofertility is as simple as wearing a patch – and offers a stylish hand-held device that tell you when you are fertile up to a week in advance I know which I would rather try.  And whilst £500 might seem rather a lot to try and have a baby, maybe now we know that actually having a baby costs £200,000 – I guess by that yardstick it is a bit of a bargain