Insurance woes

Lazy Saturday before work. I made a test batch of sex-reveal cupcakes (note: get chocolate cake mix instead of yellow, and find something much lighter and tastier than sour Mike and Ike’s pieces for the inside) and opened mail to find out that my insurance has rejected my out-of-network exception request for my midwife. That seriously sucks. Their reason for the rejection is that those services are already provided within network. If they’re talking about any midwives being available in network, they are smoking crack. I’ve checked, my midwife’s billing company has checked, Rachel checked. Nothing. So I must assume that they mean “you can have your baby in a hospital that’s in network and YOU WILL LIKE IT,” which isn’t anything approaching the same service as a midwife.

(Yesterday I got a bill in the mail from my former OB’s office for $300. For the ultrasound. You can go to some drop-in clinic and get a $100 3-D ultrasound with VIDEO AND MUSIC and they can tell you the sex at 10 weeks. But for some reason my 2D ultrasound is $300?)

So now I have to load up the word guns and get to writing an appeal. Otherwise this reluctance on the part of my insurance company means my deductible for pre-natal care, labor and delivery, and postpartum care is going to shoot up to $6,000. That’s nearly $2,400 more than the entire charge for all those things will be with my midwife. Meaning, unless I can beg and plead my way into an exception, I will be paying cash out of my pocket to have this baby, despite the fact that I am employed as management with a major corporation and I work 40 hours a week and I pay a decent chunk of my wages to have insurance. And then when the baby gets here, I won’t even have met my deductible yet. Which means I will just keep having to pay cash for everything because nothing will be covered yet. Then by the time I might have met my deductible, the whole nightmare will start over because it will be a new year and my deductible will reset.

So, you know. Glad to see that all that money I have donated to my insurance company every paycheck since I have had a job is going to good use. For someone else, presumably, because none of that fucking money has gone toward my health care AT ALL.