SWIPE RIGHT: Gay dating app Grindr is all about building relationships, however fleeting or long-term they may be. Now, CEO George Arison is getting into the business of building families — and pushing Gov. Gavin Newsom to mandate IVF coverage, including for same-sex couples. Arison has been a vocal proponent of making fertility treatment more accessible to gay couples since his own experience having two children with different surrogates in 2019. The bill he is urging Newsom to sign would improve access for LGBTQ+ people by removing the requirement that a couple needs to have tried conceiving “naturally” for a year to qualify for treatment. Grindr — which calls itself the “world’s largest social networking app for LGBTQ+ people” — also has been wading into the policy world. As Politico Influence first reported in June, the company hired a D.C. lobbying firm to work on policy issues like at-home HIV testing and IVF access. But the West Hollywood-based company has no history of lobbying in California, and the company did not weigh in when SB 729 was debated in the Legislature last year. When a colleague flagged the bill to Arison this cycle, he immediately decided to get involved. In-vitro fertilization has become the latest battleground in the post-Roe reproductive rights landscape: Democrats are fighting to preserve access to the treatment even as Republicans insist it isn’t in jeopardy from anti-abortion laws. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have both talked about it on the campaign trail, and Democrats in Congress have tried and failed twice to pass national protections for IVF access. The insurance industry is fighting the bill from state Sen. Caroline Menjivar, which would eventually require the health insurance plans of around 9 million Californians to cover fertility treatment, including IVF, which the industry argues would raise premiums. About a third of those employees already have IVF coverage, but their out-of-pocket costs would decrease under the bill. Below is an abbreviated version of POLITICO’s conversation with Arison. Why is this bill important to you — and why is it important to Grindr? I have two kids from surrogacy. They don’t tell you when you go to the IVF clinic how difficult it’s going to be. We’re lucky because it’s very expensive, but it worked out really well. When I took on this role, one of the things that was obvious to me is that I think a lot more gay men would have children if the cost was more affordable. It was critical for Grindr to be at the forefront of the benefit that it offered for surrogacy for its employees. It’s been, frankly, a total nightmare to offer good coverage on this stuff. A law in California that would allow us to do this would be very valuable. We don't need to be required to offer IVF on our health plan. That's not the issue. More broadly, Grindr is in the business of helping people build relationships … For Grindr to be advocating for making it easier and cheaper for our users to be able to have children makes a lot of business sense. You’ve talked about trying to get your insurance carrier to provide some of these benefits to your employees, and how hard and expensive that was. Generally, both large employers and health plans oppose these kinds of coverage mandates because of the cost. Are you sympathetic to those arguments? One hundred percent. Look, I’m normally a very libertarian person. I don’t want government telling me how to run things, I’m an entrepreneur. I’m all with business on these things. That said, most good corporations already offer some form of IVF coverage, and that’s especially true in the tech world. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a tech company that is not offering IVF coverage of some sort. Ultimately, if we’re going to require coverage of many other things we do in health care today, both controversial and non controversial, this is a medical need. As a society, if we want to encourage more children, which I think we do … it’s the right thing for us as a society to make IVF a lot more accessible to people. It should not be that I have a job in a tech company so I have it, or I have a job in a hotel so I don’t. This bill was first introduced last year. How did you become aware of it? Have you been talking to the author’s office, are you worried about a veto? We just heard about it last minute. We cannot take any credit for what happened. Full credit deserves to go to the people who wrote the bill and passed it, and I think they did it with very little external support. The Grindr 4 Equality initiative has been doing a lot of work on issues the California Legislature works on all the time — like home STI testing and marriage equality. Can we expect to be hearing more from you in the future? Once we were becoming a public company and trying to put a little more structure on what we do, we picked a few very specific areas to focus on. Marriage equality is one of them, access to health care is another one. Domestically, we've been less focused on those things, because we can't do everything, and so international has been more of our focus. And frankly, we feel like we can have more impact on the international side. This topic of family creation is one we want to be focused on domestically. We think it’s a logical extension of what Grindr offers to its users: building relationships. Relationships lead to marriage and marriage leads to children. And so we do want to be able to be in a position to do more on that front. I can't promise exactly what we'll do, but it's something that's top of mind for us. IT’S WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON. This is California Playbook PM, a POLITICO newsletter that serves as an afternoon temperature check on California politics and a look at what our policy reporters are watching. Got tips or suggestions? Shoot an email to lholden@politico.com.
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