Date published: 2007/05/31
The BBC says:
The IVF industry is exploiting UK couples, charging them over the odds for treatment, fertility expert Lord Robert Winston said on Wednesday.
Speaking at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales, the Imperial College London professor also criticised the fertility watchdog the HFEA on its duty of care.
The HFEA maintained it policed clinics and provided information to patients.
One private IVF clinic said it was impossible to generalise about the private sector.
Lord Winston said couples were being overcharged for fertility treatments, and some were being offered embryo screening tests for which there was no clinical justification.
He criticised doctors in the UK for overpriced treatments, and said it was "rather depressing" to consider that some IVF treatments in London cost 10 times the fees charged in Melbourne, Australia.
There are 85 licensed fertility clinics in the UK, and treatments at private clinics cost between £4,000 and £8,000 per cycle.
According to the latest figures, more than 30,000 patients underwent IVF in 2004, and the HFEA estimates around 80% of treatments are performed privately.
Lord Winston said: "One of the major problems facing us in healthcare is that IVF has become a massive commercial industry.
"It's very easy to exploit people by the fact that they're desperate and you've got the technology which they want, which may not work."
It's also easy for Winston, or anyone like him, to remedy the situation. Just open up a competing clinic and charge way under the current rate. It's called the free market. Winston is well known from all his (rather vacuous) television appearances so he already has name recognition, and any company run or backed by him would no doubt do well.
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