Back to work

After weeks of moping around and being angry and depressed, it is now time for me to get back on the ball again - not just for ttc, but work and general life as well. We are trying to pick our health care plans for next year in a way that will give us the most benefit. We have a couple options so we are trying to weigh the pros and cons of each.


My company is now offering a plan that will cover about 70% of an IVF cycle (procedure and drugs). Three is the max you can do and Shady Grove does accept the insurance. All sounds great until we look at the details. The plan itself sucks for other health care coverage and you must go through an approval process to get the IVF benefit. That means going back through all the testing again which could take a few months. It also means that we could be denied coverage. I am getting no where talking to the company about their standards for approval. They will not disclose the information. I did look at the mandates that MA has since they require companies to cover IVF. It looks like I meet the requirements with one possible glitch. You must have below a certain FSH level (blood test). I have always been below the level when testing at Shady Grove, but I was right at the level when I tested at CCRM. This could be a huge problem. I have no idea what my level is right now and it varies from month to month. If the level comes back high, we would have no coverage at all and I would be stuck with an awful health care plan for a year. I am taking DHEA and Wheatgrass like crazy, but that is no guarantee that it will help keep my FSH low. We also can't test it before the close of open enrollment so we are strictly going on by what we know right now.


The other option is a plan under Sean. We used his IVF benefit under bc/bs, but his company offers 2 other plans that have it as well. Essentially we could get one IVF mostly paid. We would have to pay for the drugs ($$$) but our cost for the IVF itself would not be much. So essentially we could do one under this plan. It is accepted by Shady Grove and by CCRM (if we decided to do it there). They also don't need pre-authorization. Our RE did only recommend one more, but I think she would be ok with us doing more than that if we thought we could pay for it and handle it emotionally. The plan itself is really confusing. They have and HSA and and HRA so we have to get the details of how it works.



So here are my thoughts:

1. I would like to have 3 chances and could probably do so if we only had to pay 30% for each try

2. I am scared to death my FSH will give us a denial

3. I like Shady Grove, but maybe after 2 failures we need to give CCRM a shot even though the travel adds a huge complexity to it all

4. Having to go through all the testing again is so stupid and time consuming - but on the other side of the coin - I need to be on the DHEA 4 months to get the max benefit so that means we shouldn't cycle until the end of February so that buys us time.

We have until next Friday to decide. Hopefully we get more answers from the insurance company so we can make the best decision possible.