To our CIGNA patients

Last month we received a letter from Cigna notifying us that they are going to reduce reimbursement for our services by 43-87%. As this level of reimbursement is less than what it actually costs us to provide this care, we were forced to make the decision that we will no longer be able to accept Cigna insurance as of December 15, 2020. Prior to terminating our agreement, we proposed a smaller decrease, but Cigna’s counteroffer was still totally unacceptable.

Texas Fertility Center is the largest fertility practice in Central Texas.

We provide approximately 75% of all fertility related services in this area, and we are one of the leading fertility centers in the country – the 15th largest in the nation according to Forbes magazine. We are also the co-founders of Ovation Fertility, a national network of IVF laboratories. As such, we know what different managed care companies pay for fertility services around the country, which is how we know that Cigna’s offer to us is entirely inappropriate.

In doing our research, we noticed that Cigna increased its revenues to 155 billion dollars over the past 12 months, and they generated net income of over 5 billion dollars. This represents a 300% increase in revenue and a doubling of net income in only the past year. It is unfortunate that, despite these massive profits, they are lowering the quality of care they are making available to their insureds while simultaneously attempting to take further advantage of the physicians who provide the medical care to their customers.

We also quite frankly find Cigna’s decision to try to restrict women’s access to quality fertility treatment in the midst of a global pandemic both despicable and totally irresponsible. We have fought for over twenty years to improve women’s access to quality fertility treatment. Fortunately, many of America’s leading companies support this effort. They are working with independent third party companies to help them add fertility benefits for their employees using outcomes based high quality networks. We believe that Cigna’s actions – that ignore outcomes and focus solely on identifying the lowest cost providers – will hurt both them and their customers in the long run.

We wrote a letter to Cigna expressing our concerns and we sent copies to Congressman Michael Burgess, the Republican Leader of the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Barbara Collura, the President and CEO of Resolve. We would also appreciate your taking this information to your Director of Benefits. While we are not optimistic that this will change Cigna’s mind before December 15, we want you to know that we are doing all that we can to be able to continue to care for you. As always, we appreciate your support and hope that you will choose to stay with TFC.