Put me on the payroll.

Sometimes I feel as if my doctor's office should be paying me. I firmly believe that as a patient you must be an advocate for yourself. I believe that as an IF patient I should be as educated as possible about procedures, what comes next, percentages, side effects and what my insurance will and won't cover. However, I also believe that a great doctor and his staff should make you feel like it isn't so important that you know everything because they know everything and are on the ball about it.

Now, I love Dr. K (my RE) and Dr. D (my OB/GYN) but both of their offices frustrate me to no end. I spoke with Dr. K's office a few weeks ago and they told me that IVF was completely covered. I called my insurance company to make sure. The lady on the phone at the insurance company also told me that IVF was totally covered. At the end of our conversation she asked, "Would you like me to send you a copy of the policy?" I thought, "Why not? Sounds great." A few days later it arrived.....20+ pages of information and medical-jargon. I started reading for "fun" and discovered a sentence on page 3 that dealt with some requirements for covering IVF if you have unexplained infertility. The insurance company requires 3 medicated IUIs (injectible gonadatropins). It says it just like that.....3 medicated IUIs and the injectibles part is in parenthesis.
So, I called Dr. K's office right away to discuss this with them. The insurance girl wasn't there but the receptionist kept saying "but you had 3 medicated IUIs." I kept telling her, "Yes but two were only with clomid." She started to explain how Dr. K puts his patients on clomid and injectibles at the same time......as if I didn't remember giving myself the shots!!! Anyway, I finally talked to Erica and she said she would look into it. I brought her a copy of the policy so she would understand EXACTLY what I was talking about....that was a week ago.
We arrived home from our vacation yesterday (It was awesome....more about that later)....so I called to check on the situation and they are still waiting on some stuff and didn't know BLAH BLAH BLAH. Well I explained that we're on CD 26 here and I needed to know which protocol to start next week.....hopefully they'll get on the ball.

The mail came today and in it was a bill from our RE. We are being charged for our consultation appointment which the insurance won't cover......because the RE's office filed it incorrectly. I spoke with the insurance company and confirmed that yes they cover the consultation but that it is filed incorrectly. I've told Dr. K's office at least twice that they needed to refile and I wasn't going to pay it because it just needed to be refiled.

So maybe Dr. K should just put me on the payroll since I'm the one tracking down whether or not my insurance covers procedures and I'm the one doing the leg work to figure out why they've denied a claim that should've been covered. I wonder if he's accepting resumes. Do I get an employee discount on my treatments??

**Disclaimer: I LOVE Dr. K and Dr. D. I LOVE LOVE LOVE them.....which is why I'm willing to deal with their crazy offices. I actually really like their nurses when I'm in the office and the insurance girl at Dr. K's has been nothing but nice.

Who is that girl yelling in CVS??

If you happened to be in your local CVS Pharmacy last night around 6pm and you noticed a young lady crying on her cell phone and then yelling out "Well that sucks" and you wondered, "Who is that girl?" Well, let me introduce myself....my name is Amy and I'm dealing with infertility.

Yes, I am aware that I totally lost it in the middle of CVS but please let me explain. You see I was trying to fill a prescription that I had to start taking right away.....but the insurance company kept insisting that I use the mail order pharmacy. I tried to explain that the mail order pharmacy cannot get medicine from their warehouse in Boston to my house in Texas in 8 hours......but the insurance company couldn't seem to grasp this fact. So they were denying my claim. I tried to be nice at first. I promise I did. But I lost it. The stress of infertility plus the stress of work on Monday just boiled up and I exploded.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the customer service rep from said insurance agency. I'm sorry I yelled at you. I understand that you don't make the rules and that you just answer the phones for minimal pay at best. I'm sorry I told you that your company sucked and hung up on you. I was very rude. It won't happen again.

JW put everything in perspective when noting later that although it sucks I had to pay $46 out of pocket when I should've just paid $10 that if we didn't have the insurance we did we'd be paying over $2000 for this cycle (Labs, ultrasounds, medicines, procedures, etc). So, in the grand scheme of things paying $46 is way better than paying $2000.