Don’t turn IVF into the next F-35

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Hans Gangeskar is the CEO of Overture Life, a Madrid-based fertility technology company.

In the skies above Iran, the world is learning in real-time that the F-35 is a remarkable jet.

For years it was mocked as a trillion-dollar procurement disaster. Cost overruns, delays and congressional hearings. All of that is true. The defense contractors had gotten so good at padding cost-plus contracts that the program nearly died, and no one thought the plane was actually good.

Then the shooting started. American and Israeli F-35s are operating deep in hostile airspace and proving why the aircraft exists. Many of those pilots are women.

It is hard not to admire the image: women in advanced stealth fighters dismantling the air defenses of the mullahs in Tehran and bringing the prospect of freedom a little closer for millions of Iranians.

Here is the policy contrast: Israel also helps cover fertility treatments like IVF. The United States generally does not.

Tricare is an extraordinary program and military families deserve it. But it is also a product of the same system that produced the F-35 procurement model: cost-plus health care.

Pay for procedures and you get more procedures.

Defense contractors perfected cost-plus. Health care copied the model for MRIs and lab tests. In cost-plus systems every extra hand gets paid. That’s not how anyone wants their private parts managed.

That model is already the central problem in American medicine. It would be a mistake to extend it into fertility policy just as Washington begins debating IVF coverage.

IVF should not become the next cost-plus program.

The Pentagon should not copy the 1990s defense procurement playbook. We have a unique opportunity to take what we’ve learned from military procurement over the last decade to give our service women the best fertility care available, and not put them in the middle of a procurement abuse fest (like the rest of health care).

Think SpaceX Starshield. Think Anduril.

Fixed budgets. Strong incentives. Competition over performance.

Fertility policy could work the same way. Provide service women with a defined fertility benefit and let clinics compete to deliver results within that budget.

Women already shop for IVF the way Americans shop for anything else: comparing clinics, prices and success rates. Trust women. Leverage the market. If Congress copies the cost-plus playbook to IVF, why not join the mullahs who wrote the playbook on telling women what to do?

IVF clinics already work this way. Don’t turn them into Lockheed Martin.

America should help the men and women defending the country build families. But when we do it, we should design the system like modern defense technology.

Not like the early F-35 program.