Maybe, just maybe it shouldn’t cost close to 10k to even TRY to have a kid through IVF? More like 15k out of pocket costs till the Medicare rebate anyway.
1 in 6 aussie couples will struggle with infertility whilst 1 in 20 kids is born of IVF. https://monashivf.com/one-in-six/
1 in 6 couples. 1 in 20 babies. You can see a fair gap here. Unless your comfortably “middle class”, you screwed. yes there are some public clinics with no gap, but the wait times are staggering. If we’re worried about falling birth rates FULLY funding IVF and fertility treatments through Medicare is a no brainer.
Government financed IVF will not solve the birth decline, nor will a plethora of government carrots and incentives for short term fixes. Because Australia has a long tradition with immigration I don’t see low birth rates as a dire problem, it is bad news for older homogenous societies like Russia, China and Japan. What will be necessary though is a shift in our composition of tax policies and handouts. Much more tax collections will have to come from non personal income.
