Insurance

Every October is open enrollment at work. Translation: I have the dreaded job of searching and scouring insurance information looking for the best option for our family. I guess you can say that is is wonderful that we have so many options, however, I don't see it that way at all. Instead, what it means to me is I have to decide now, what may happen to us in 2009 -- what tests we may want to do, whether Thomas will need a new pair of glasses, if we want to do any fertility testing and set money aside in a pre-tax reimbursement account, if so how much, how it will effect our monthly budget, and so forth.

The insurance we have used over the last 5 years has driven me crazy because I have to choose a primary care physician before meeting him. According to the the help desk, I should go online and look at the doctor's photos and choose the one I think will work best. I have no idea how they expect me to tell anything by a photo. I keep asking if they grade the doctors in any way, or if I can get a list of those that often have complaints, etc. They don't have anything but the photos. So the next option they said was to ask other family members? Well, what do you think? Any recommendations? Maybe we should go with the old guy because he has more experience, or the young guy because he might have cutting edge information, or maybe the Chinese guy because he might be the smartest?

And of course, a major force in our life is family planning. Every insurance company covers "family planning" as they like to call it. I'm not exactly sure what "family planning" is ... I think what we are doing is family planning. But, as I have learned it doesn't cover our family planning. Instead it covers prevention of pregnancy, i.e. birth control and abortion. And it covers pregnancy. I have a hard time throwing pregnancy into the "planning" stage, it seems rather final to me. Beyond that, I'm really clueless because I have not needed any of those things.

So, I spent an hour last night scouring benefit brochures. Comparing and contrasting, looking for any possible way an insurance company may cover infertility. And it was very upsetting as usual. Every one had an exclusion for anything related to infertility, including the doctor consultation, all the testing, all the meds and the actually procedure.

Once again, they all failed to meet my expectations and hope. And once again I'll have to listen to everyone else talk about how wonderful our health insurance plans are and fail to understand why I find it so disappointing and why I get so frustrated having to plan so far ahead.

I'm learning that sometimes a little humor is good.