Argh, health insurance!

I live in Australia and our IUI's were paid for partly by Medicare (our universal health care scheme) and the rest was out of pocket. Medicare paid for roughly half. But my husband and I also have private health insurance which covers mostly in hospital procedures (in a private hospital which means little to no waiting as in a public hospital some procedures have a wait of years) and a few extras like dental, optical, plus some appointments with specialists. 

When I had my lap in July, Medicare paid for part of it, our health insurance paid for the other part of it and the rest was out of pocket. When we had our IVF education meeting with our nurse she gave us the price list and told me to call our private health insurance as they might cover some parts of it.

That was way back in early November. I've put it off for ages, partly because I was still sad and trying to deal with moving on to IVF and partly because I hate making phone calls. But I sucked up and this morning got out the costings booklet from our fertility clinic and rang our health insurance.

I sat on hold for 15mins before talking to the most rude and incompetent woman. I explained that we're moving on to IVF and that I had item numbers from my clinic, I needed her to look up the item numbers and see if they're covered under our policy.

She told me that yes, our coverage covers all infertility treatments. That surprised me, so I explained we'd already done two IUI's this year and asked if they were covered. She said yes they were covered and asked which hospital they were done at. It was then I knew this conversation was going to be painful. She kept insisting that they were done at a hospital and I kept explaining that no, they weren't done at a hospital, they were done at a fertility clinic. She asked for the name of the fertility clinic and then told me that our clinic doesn't exist.

After the third time I stopped her and explained exactly what an IUI is and why it's not done in a hospital. She put me on hold and asked her supervisor, then came back to me and said no, it's not covered.

Then I asked her if our IVF would be covered, once again she rattled off her spiel about how all infertility treatments are covered, I stopped her right there and told her that's not true because you didn't cover our two IUI's!

I had six item numbers and all I wanted to know was if they were covered! But she didn't want to look them up on the computer system so instead we went around and around until I asked to talk to someone else. Once I said that she asked for the item numbers and looked them up. Argh! Talk about fustrating. Turns out they will cover a portion of our egg pick up, embryo transfer and ICSI fees. They'll also cover part of the anesthetists fee and the operating theatre fees. But they won't cover the cost of medications, the scans or or management fees.

Holy cow was it hard getting that information out of her. They don't make this easy, we pay thousands of dollars for private health insurance but when it comes time to claim it's like jumping through hoops.

I know it's worse in other countries and I'm so thankful we live in Australia and thankful that we can afford private health insurance. But it just seems like everything to do with infertility is a battle, even just finding out the cost of the treatments.