It played out like a scene from a James Bond movie. Wearing an immaculately cut tuxedo, I strolled across the casino floor towards the roulette table, a gorgeous blonde by my side, and took my position at the table. After some opening banter with the croupier, I slid my chips on to the mat saying “Half on red, the rest on black”. At least, that was what it felt like in my head. In reality, I was standing at the counter of the fertility clinic, but the bet I was placing was just as significant. Half on the blue credit card, the rest on the silver credit card, and if our number comes up, we win a new baby.
One of the drawbacks of going through IVF is that you are exposed to the total stupidity of the US health insurance industry. Our health insurer has a contract with our fertility clinic, and covers a large proportion of the cost of the fertility treatment. This is rare, and was one of the main reasons that we decided to give this a shot. But our health insurer does not have a contract with our fertility clinic's lab, so we have one deductible for in-network fertility treatment, and another deductible for out-of-network lab work. Wifey will need to come to the clinic once a week for ultrasound checks, and needs to have blood drawn and analyzed on the same day to check hormone levels. We could do the blood work at our local lab place as they are in-network. But that would mean a 7am visit to the lab for blood work and then driving for miles to the fertility clinic for the ultrasound on the same morning, all just to save a few dollars. Why do the insurance companies make things so complicated?
We ran into similar issues with the pharmacy insurance provider. IVF treatment involves a lot of medication, and I now have a cupboard in my study that would not look out of place at Walgreens – needles, meds, swabs, sharps disposal container. The fertility clinic had sent our prescriptions to their pharmacy for processing, but on our first visit to the pharmacy, we were told that our payment would be several thousand dollars, as the pharmacy insurer required pre-approval for the order. I don’t get this – if the doctor sends a prescription to the pharmacy, why would the insurer also need to approve the script? The crazy thing is that, once they had wasted a few days going backwards and forwards with the clinic and the pharmacy, the insurer approved everything and our payment was much lower than we had originally expected. So with a large paper bag full of syringes, needles and strange looking medications (please don’t let me get pulled over by the police on the way home!) we set off for home.
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