- Key Insight: Discover how individually owned, underwritten fertility benefits rewrite employer risk and portability.
- Expert Quote: Flora CEO Laura McDonald calls fertility as much a financial as a medical crisis.
- Forward Look: Expect fertility benefit portability to become a differentiator in talent attraction and retention.
- Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review
A new fertility benefit provider is challenging the way organizations administer their fertility services — and they're hoping to reach more people and lower costs along the way.
Only around 42% of U.S. employers provide fertility benefits, according to the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, which is up from 30% from 2020. However, traditional benefit plans are costly for organizations and there remains significant gaps in coverage for employees, depending on their personal and professional situation. Flora aims to introduce a new approach to fertility benefits that may solve both issues at the same time.
"Fertility is just as much a financial crisis as it is a medical one," says Laura McDonald, co-Founder and CEO at Flora. "I was going to bed every night wondering why we haven't solved this yet, but having been in the individually owned insurance space for a while, I felt like there could be a place for that here."
Read more: Maven addresses male and female fertility needs with new tool
Like most traditional benefits, fertility care is typically an employer-sponsored service that is provided and owned by the employer, where the employee participates, but doesn't technically own the policy. Because of that, any employee working under the company has the same access to fertility care, keeping rates relatively affordable since they're based on the whole group and spread across the employer's entire workforce.
However, that also means there is often a spending cap on procedures and services to ensure that the budget can cover the same procedure and services for employees who may need them in the future. Flora Fertility turns the whole process on its head.
Keeping care costs low for everyone
The provider's suite of fertility benefits — which includes diagnostics, medication IUI and IVF treatments — is individually owned, which means that employees' policies aren't tied to their employers at all. It's also medically underwritten, meaning that an employee's eligibility and costs are based on their health history, age and individual risk factors, making it easier for Flora to dispense coverage up to $50,000 based on specific needs, rather than generalizing it for everyone and limiting employees who may need more support in order to potentially support those who may need less in comparison.
Employers just need to invest in Flora as a voluntary benefit and choose how much they would like to contribute to an employee's policies, which run at around $30-40 a month per employee. After that, Flora is responsible for any costs employees may incur.
Read more: How Lyft built a holistic fertility benefits program
"It allows us to offer more customized and generally more robust coverage," McDonald says. "It also provides stability for employers now that group plans have taken off their utilization costs are huge. This takes them off the hook and shifts the responsibility to us."
Improving access to fertility care
Individually owned and underwritten fertility benefits are also portable. Every Flora Fertility user accesses their benefits through a digital application and manages their policy on an online portal. Employees will then submit their claim through Flora as opposed to through their insurance provider. This makes fertility benefits more accessible and reliable for employees in more constricting circumstances, such as those transitioning careers, in smaller companies or in need of a sabbatical from work. Employees won't need to sacrifice the necessary means of building a family in order to progress their career or prioritize their personal life.
Considering other paths to fertility benefits could also be a good strategic move for recruiting and retention initiatives. With nearly 70% of employees willing to switch organizations for better fertility benefits, according to research from Maven Clinic, organizations should be investing in competitive benefits that keep employees from looking elsewhere to have their needs met.
"We have to make sure that we can finally make fertility treatment accessible to the masses and most people don't want to stay in one place their whole career," McDonald says. "So as we look at the next generation and bringing them on and retaining them we need to be offering more flexible types of fertility benefits."
