Question: how come IVF is so expensve for some people and free for others??????

Claire O'Donnell answered on 18 Jun 2010:

This is a bit of a trickyone but keep with it because it’s really important – here goes.
The NHS can’t afford to provide all treatments that are available for all diseases. That means there has to be some way of sharing out the treatments that can be offered fairly. In some places the population might have a lot of heart disease or cancer and in another there might be a lot of people who have strokes, in those circumstances you might think that you needed to spend more on those diesases to help a lot of people get better so that would leave you less for everyone else and for things like IVF. Still there – good:)
If you can’t offer loads of IVF to everyone who might want it, you have to come up with a way of deciding who gets it and how much treatment they get. Firstly you can decide only to offer treatment to people who have the best chance of getting pregnant from the treatment. You know from what Greg has posted that women’s eggs aren’t as good as the woman gets older so treatment is less likely to work. This means that in most parts of the country women aged 40 and over will have to pay for IVF themselves if they want it because their chance of getting pregnant from the teratment is so much lower than a younger woman. For women under 40 it’s free on the NHS because they have a better chance of it working – more babies for the number of treatments available:). Then you can look to see if there are a certain number of treatments during which someone is likely to get pregnant. It turns out that most people who are going to get pregnant will do so within 3 treatments. After that more treatments are unlikely to produce a baby. Knowing this some parts of the NHS (about 1/4 of the country) will offer 3 treatments to people. Others have decided they can’t afford this and so they offer 2 treatments (a little over 30% of the country) with just over 40% offering 1 treatment . Finally,t he other way of deciding who to treat is to think about who ‘needs’ treatment most. Lots of people think that if you have never had a child then you ‘need’ treatment more than someone who already has a child and wants to have another. Based on this in lots of areas you have to be childless to get free NHS treatment. There is a lot of arguement about what should happen if one of the couple has a child or children and the other doesn’t. Some people feel that those children are part of the couple’s life even though only one of the adults is their real mum or dad and so they aren’t childless. Others think that because the couple don’t have their own child then they are childless – depends how you look at things.
So that ‘s the reason IVF is free for some and not for others. Phew got there in the end;) Very good question!!!