The Importance of Offering Fertility Benefits in Your Healthcare Package

If there’s one overarching lesson to be learned from the pandemic and the Great Resignation, it’s that employees will both stay and leave over health care benefits.

For employers to recruit and retain top talent, they should think about health care benefits as a number one player in the employment game. Research has shown that health coverage is important, especially to a younger demographic, with 85% of millennials claiming health care coverage is an essential piece of their employment.

This has employers asking how they can enhance their benefits packages to attract and retain their most valuable resource — human capital. One answer is clear: offer a comprehensive healthcare package that recognizes the increasing demand for family building services, like diagnostics, treatment and fertility preservation services. Major employers like Bank of America, Pinterest, Spotify, Google and many others are including these services in their health care packages, and it is time more businesses — large and small — follow suit.

As the founder and CEO of a fertility services provider and as a business owner who offers my own employees family building benefits, including fertility care and adoption benefits, I believe it is important for all leaders to look at employee recruitment and retention from this lens and consider whether adding fertility care could impact their workforce.

Coverage For All Medical Conditions

The U.S. birth rate has been in a steady decline, hitting an all-time low in 2020, and one culprit is a lack of financial accessibility to fertility care.

Infertility isn’t elective, but rather a condition that affects one in eight U.S. couples. Employers should recognize that when they offer insurance coverage to their employees, they’re offering to provide for all of their medical conditions, including infertility. By making fertility care a regular part of employee benefits packages and health insurance plans, more people are able to access these medical services and understand exactly which treatment options are best for them.

Fertility Care Can Amplify Your DEI Efforts

Unfortunately, there remains a stigma that infertility is solely a women’s health issue, when in fact, up to 40% of infertility cases are related to male-factor infertility. Additionally, by only focusing on women, we erase a large subset of the population that require fertility services to build their families, including those within the LGBTQ+ community, or single aspiring parents.

By making fertility care accessible to all members of an organization, you’re sending a clear message that you support diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and value all families from all backgrounds.

The Cost for Employers is Negligible

The high costs of fertility treatments can be a deterrent for companies to offer fertility care as part of a comprehensive healthcare package. But adding fertility benefits to existing health plans would result in a maximum premium increase of just over 1%, essentially making fertility costs negligible to employers. And the ultimate payoff to employers is higher retention and recruitment.

How You Can Get Started

Here’s how you can introduce fertility care into your benefits package.

1. Call your current employee insurance provider and find out what fertility care options and add-ons they offer.
2. If your current provider doesn’t offer fertility care add-ons, you can work with an outside provider who solely offers fertility care benefits. This supplemental insurance coverage can help fill any gaps.
3. If neither of those options fits your current setup, you can also offer employees a health stipend, a fixed amount that employees can use for the medical care they need. This stipend is included on their paycheck, making it extra taxable income.

Offering fertility care as part of a benefits package is an important and essential way to show your company’s values and demonstrate to employees that they work in a family-friendly, employee-centric environment.