To Govern is to Choose: A Critique of Ontario’s New Plan to Publicly Fund In Vitro Fertilization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In December 2015, the government of Ontario introduced the Fertility Program, a plan to publicly fund in vitro fertilization (IVF). The Fertility Program seeks to use the advanced reproductive technology to reduce the occurrence of multiple births and to increase access to fertility treatments. This paper does not argue that IVF should not be publicly funded at all, but rather posits that in a time when the government is restricting healthcare spending, scarce resources must be allocated appropriately. The Ontario government has failed to craft a cost-effective funding program to maximize these limited resources by expanding the role of healthcare to a point that is unsustainable. While the Fertility Program makes steps towards achieving its goals, it fails to implement a comprehensive regulatory scheme and provide financial assistance to those with the greatest need. The province’s failure to provide exclusion criteria to access funding allows the government to escape accountability by deferring public policy decisions to individual fertility clinics. In light of these shortcomings, several reforms to the Fertility Program are suggested and the implications of the Fertility Program going forward have been identified.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".