Family Building Act

Exciting news via RESOLVE this morning: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) will be introducing the Family Building Act to the Senate! This bill mirrors the House version of the bill (H.R. 697) and aims at making ART more affordable by requiring insurance companies to cover what is essentially a legitimate (and to some extent, curable) medical problem.

More info about the Senate version of the bill is here at Senator Gillibrand's blog, and here is the full text of S. 1258 Senate bill.

What you can do:

Send a letter/email thanking Senator Gillibrand for her initiative.

Contact your Senator to either co-sponsor or support this bill.

HR 697 has been assigned to committees. Contact the House Committee members directly to show their support. (The 3 assigned committees are linked in the middle of the page.)

If you haven't already, contact your Representative to support HR 697 as well.

Please feel free to post on your blogs, message boards, and FB pages!

Here is an example of what I wrote my senators. Feel free to copy this and edit it for your own!

Please support the Family Building Act (S. 1258). Even though Massachusetts is the only state that requires insurance companies to cover infertility, every state needs to follow our example. And even Massachusetts isn't perfect. Insurance companies put severe caps on the dollar amounts and number of cycles they will cover for procedures. That needs to be stopped. If someone is having trouble getting pregnant, the last thing they want to think about is how they only get $10K or 3 cycles to make it work. And if that fails, they're on their own. What if they want to have a second child or a third? Will they be turned down because they've already used up their $10K? We need insurance companies to realize that infertility is like any other disease and deserves FULL coverage. Thank you!

Sincerely,
Elana Kahn