Anonymous wrote:When I joined this non-profit, I wasn't married. Now I have learned not having coverage for IVF and a few other issues the benefits of a good plan. Sometimes more salary money at a firm may not equal what you loose in benefits. My DH works for a religous based company and at the time the money sounded better but when you loose so much in insurance even down to viagra it wasn't worth it.

Viagra should NOT be covered! This is one thing when all arguments about healthcare come up. They want to bring down healthcare costs? First thing to go is any of these types of drugs. Seriously.

Anonymous wrote:My husband works for a $2billion profit/year company and they don't offer any fertility coverage with our insurance. It is not mandatory and entirely up to the company. What your insurance broker is probably saying is that there is no way for your company to provide fertility coverage within your existing rate structure and your company is not willing to go to a higher rate plan for everyone.

Same here. Husband works for a huge corporation with no fertility coverage.

When I joined this non-profit, I wasn't married. Now I have learned not having coverage for IVF and a few other issues the benefits of a good plan. Sometimes more salary money at a firm may not equal what you loose in benefits. My DH works for a religous based company and at the time the money sounded better but when you loose so much in insurance even down to viagra it wasn't worth it.

My husband owns his own business so had every incentive to get fertility coverage. His plan through United Healthcare had minimal coverage but still much better than the much larger company that I work for. He looked into getting a rider for better fertility coverage but it was outrageously expensive because of the size of his company and not really worth it. We decided to go the shared risk route and get the tax write-off instead. It's true that companies don't have to provide fertility coverage but the plan my large company chose has made me very bitter about them. They do not even cover ANY diagnostic testing (luckily I had it all done before joining this co) and I have had major problems with non-fertility related claims. I blame my employer not the insurance company. I would expect a large organization to have a better plan.

I think it's the vast minority of companies- big, small, private, public, nonprofit, forprofit- that cover IVF. Unfortunately.

How could you take that, it's so expensive.

You have a distorted sense of entitlement. Fertility coverage is an optional item and not something that an employer should need to cover. Many companies are offered packages based on the number of employees and they can choose certain options. Fertility coverage is very expensive, especially for smaller companies as the costs to premiums ratio is very high and the insurance company is very likely to lose money on offering it, especially with very few employees enrolled. So, many companies aren't given that option without switching to much more expensive package plans and some don't have it as an option at all because it. Calling Carefirst and talking to a non sales representative who has no idea of the type/size/category of your company really has no relevance to whether the option is available.

We used a gestational carrier and we had to purchase independent health coverage for her that included fertility treatments. It cost us about $500/month for about 14 months. It was expensive, but the costs were higher than the $7000 that we paid for the policy. The fertility treatments, prenatal care and the monthly ultrasounds and neonatalogist expenses (our twins were considered a high risk pregnancy), it all came to much more than $7000. Additionally, after the twins were born and they reverted to our own insurance (also BCBS, but not Carefirst), we incurred $140K worth of hospital expenses and we paid about $8K out of that amount. If you purchase your own policy that covers fertility treatments as a secondary policy to your existing policy, all expenses will be sent to your BCBS insurance first and any unpaid expenses after that are subsequently sent to the new policy that you'd get. You only get billed for what isn't covered after going through both policies. I think you'll find that the money that you spend on buying your own auxiliary insurance policy will be less than the expenses without it.