00:00It's definitely significant, but it does not feel worse than yesterday, so we are there on that.
00:10Today, I wanted to start to dig into both the financials of this situation, what we can do about it
00:17from a policy perspective,
00:19and how we can really effectively fight to make fertility care and reproductive care financially accessible to everyone.
00:26Before we do that, I'm going to pull up a chair because this is kind of bloated.
00:33All right, here we go.
00:34And before people say that a public health care system could never cover something like egg freezing,
00:39France's public health care system, egg freezing is free for women between 29 and 37, and the storage fees are
00:47minimal per year.
00:48A lot of times people think that the responsibilities of Congress are just legislative, but they are also investigative.
00:56And the reason that I say that is because figuring out how to make egg freezing and fertility care affordable
01:02and accessible to families everywhere requires some digging.
01:06So let's talk about how my costs were broken down in my experience.
01:10In total, I believe I paid between about $9,000 and $10,000 for this cycle, but I did not
01:17cut one big check for that.
01:19That cost was, for me, divided into a little over $5,000 went to my clinic, and that included all
01:26of my blood work, ultrasounds, and procedure.
01:30And the other part of that went to my prescription drugs, the most expensive of which were my hormonal injections.
01:35In terms of the bigger picture, there are some major issues in the American health care system that we must
01:42address if we want reproductive care, or frankly, most health care, to be accessible to working people.
01:47In the context of fertility care specifically, it is criminal how horrifically our health care system treats women.
01:55From dramatically underfunding women's research to neglecting menopausal women and postmenopausal women in care, women's health care is dramatically underfunded.
02:06In fact, women weren't even required to be part of clinical trials until 1993.
02:12Birth control wasn't even required to be covered by insurance companies until 2012.
02:18Pregnancy was allowed to be treated as a pre-existing condition where insurance companies could legally deny you covering until
02:26very recently.
02:27And there has been a systemic failure to study and treat menopause with the efficacy, funding, and attention that it
02:35deserves.
02:36So if we had to fight tooth and nail just for insurers to cover birth control a few years ago,
02:42it is no surprise that we are going to have to put up a fight to make fertility care and
02:47reproductive care covered for every American.
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