Former president Donald Trump gives a thumbs up before speaking at the National Rifle Association convention on May 18 in Dallas. (LM Otero/AP)
Column by Philip Bump
Donald Trump on Thursday told NBC News that, if reelected, his administration would ensure that in vitro fertilization (IVF) was free for all Americans. But before we dig into that claim, we should talk about breakfast meat.
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At an event in Wisconsin on Thursday, the former president offered a seemingly incongruous argument in support of his return to the White House.
“You take a look at bacon and some of these products, and some people don’t eat bacon anymore,” he said. “And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down — you know, this was caused by their horrible energy. Wind — they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.”
These are all typical elements of his campaign patter. He’s been using them so long that he has little snippets of shorthand for them: No one eats bacon, what if there’s no wind, etc. In Wisconsin, he just sort of mashed all those shorthands together, resulting in something incomprehensible to anyone not well-versed in Trump’s political lore. It’s like presenting someone new to the franchise with the last 10 minutes of a recent Marvel movie.
The point is that Trump has a familiar, comfortable and established way of running for president. As well he might; he went from being a political outsider in 2016 to being the American with the most experience at the top of his party’s ticket since Richard Nixon in 1972. So he drops strange riffs on wind power and bacon — and he makes sweeping promises about health care that he can’t or won’t effect once in office.
This wasn’t entirely a surprise, mind you. It was generally understood that there was no perfect alternative in the wings. Trump’s proclamations that he’d find a perfect alternative yielded widespread skepticism, particularly given his antipathy toward reinforcing his promises with plans.
In 2020, the effort was more egregious. Trump contracted covid-19 that October and credited Regeneron’s drug with his recovery. So, speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity, he made a promise.
This was even predictable then. He’d done something similar in 2018, promising just before the midterm elections that his party would deliver huge tax cuts by the beginning of November. Not only did that not happen, there was no indication it was ever in process to any significant degree. It was just Trump saying that he would do a thing he thought people would like and keeping his fingers crossed.
It’s important context for the IVF promise.
“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump told NBC. “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”
You will notice that those are two different things: the administration/we paying, which implies federal funding, or making insurers cover the cost, which would be the insurance companies paying. Or, more precisely, it would probably be insurance companies’ customers paying, since the insurers couldn’t simply absorb the hefty costs of IVF without increasing the money paid by everyone else. The point of the ACA, incidentally, was to increase coverage by mandating that people carry insurance, meaning more healthy people paying for low-cost insurance and increasing the income for the insurers mandated to provide the coverage. Then Trump pushed for that mandate to be removed.
Beyond there being no reason to assume that Trump would actually try to implement free IVF coverage as president, the idea would certainly alienate some of his more fervent supporters. The reason IVF is a subject of discussion in the 2024 campaign is there’s an effort on the right to block the procedure. Between that constituency and those who aren’t thrilled about a promise to spend billions of dollars on personal health care (or to make private companies spend those billions), there will be (and has already been) pressure on Trump and other Republicans to drop this idea.
