Calling it a “historic victory” with his usual unearned boastfulness, President Donald Trump announced a new effort to make in vitro fertilization—better known as IVF—more accessible.

“In the Trump administration, we want to make it easier for all couples to have babies, raise children and have the families they’ve always dreamed about,” Trump told the assembled press corps in the Oval Office Thursday.

IVF is a medical procedure that helps people struggling with infertility conceive a child by fertilizing an egg outside the body and then implanting the embryo.

Trump’s announcement amounted to two things: most-favored nation pricing on the drugs, and a polite request for companies to cover IVF in their health care plans, without any stick or carrot to compel them to do so.

If you wonder why Trump cares, this is part of the right wing’s creepy efforts to encourage white women to have more babies, a particular obsession of Elon Musk.

The most-favored nation part is actually good. Americans spend far more on the same drugs as consumers in other countries. Under this kind of policy, drug makers would be required to offer Americans the lowest price they charge in any other developed nation.

It’s an idea that’s been floated for years by both parties, including under the Biden and Trump administrations, as a way to push back against pharmaceutical price gouging. Americans routinely pay two to three times more for the same medications sold in Canada, Europe, or Japan. Proposals to let Americans import cheaper Canadian drugs have drawn bipartisan applause, but relentless industry lobbying—and similarly bipartisan cowardice—has always killed them off.

Lowering drug prices is a worthy goal, but when it comes to IVF, it barely moves the needle. The $15,000–$20,000 cost of a typical IVF cycle doesn’t include the necessary medications, so even a few thousand dollars in drug savings still leaves families priced out. It’s a modest discount dressed up as a miracle—and a far cry from Trump’s 2024 campaign promise to make IVF free.

“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” he said at the time. “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”

It’s almost impressive how easily he promises everything without a plan to ever deliver.

That promise wouldn’t have come cheap.

“The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology says its member clinics performed 389,993 IVF cycles in 2022,” NBC reported at the time. “At a cost of around $20,000 apiece, that would come to $7.8 billion for that one year.” But that’s just a fifth of the $40 billion Trump is sending to Argentina to save his pal Javier Milei. (Of course, demand would soar if IVF were free, so maybe the cost might be … half an Argentina?)

The second part of his announcement, urging companies to cover the expensive treatments, is where the whole thing tips into absurdity.

According to NOTUS, the Departments of Labor, Treasury, and Health and Human Services will provide “guidance” allowing a “new benefit option” that would permit—but not require—employers to offer IVF as a stand-alone benefit. And with no carrot, no stick, and no reason for any company not already offering this to suddenly start.

Asked why businesses should bother, one senior administration official said they should want to “bring a healthy baby into the world at the lowest possible cost.” Ah yes, let’s dig through those corporate charters for the part about “bringing healthy babies into the world”—at their own expense.

You want companies to do that, you either force them—or you pay them.

But really, if bringing healthy babies into the world is such a noble goal, why doesn’t Trump find the dollars for it the way he’s found them for Argentina? Because he doesn’t actually care. It’s easier to announce something that sounds compassionate than to spend a dime making it real.

Not much of a victory. Certainly not historic. Just more of the same Trumpian bullshit.

Markos Moulitsas is founder and editor of the blogging website Daily Kos and author of three books.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos