Infertility Cost

Generally speaking, people feel most comfortable maintaining the status quo. For example it’s easier to stay in a job that is not boosting your career than it is to quit and look for something more fulfilling.  Likewise, it is far easier to repeat cycles involving Pergonal injections and intrauterine insemination (IUIs) month after month than it is to abandon the familiar routine and take the emotional and financial risks involved with ART (advanced reproductive treatment). If you have been engaging in low-tech treatments for six months to a year and still haven’t had a baby, you have reached a set of crossroads-and a daunting one at that. Your choices: Continue your current treatment, move to more advances treatment, or give up trying to become pregnant altogether. If everything else has failed and you still want to give birth, ART may be your only viable alternative.

As much as you want to be pregnant, the idea of taking massive doses of fertility drugs and then having your eggs plucked out of your ovaries might paralyze you with fear.

In addition to the fear there are three other major roadblocks encountered by most people considering ART;  fertility cost (insufficient finances), job stress, and lack of support from family and friends.

In deciding to take a more advance approach, you now need to remove the roadblocks to ART and get psyched up for the rigors of high-tech treatment. Like you need to:

Educate yourself about medical insurance for infertility

Manage your social life by garnering the support of your family and friends

Make effective decisions, and…

Motivate yourself to hang in despite setbacks: Don’t Give Up

By the time you’ve begun thinking about ART, you’ve probably gotten use to having blood taken out of your arm for various tests. While parting with a vial of your blood has become second nature, parting with your money for infertility cost gets more and more difficult as infertility treatment goes on. Even if you are insured, many polices have limited benefits for infertility treatment. For most people, the high cost of advanced reproductive treatment becomes the major roadblock to getting pregnant when they thought they couldn’t.

In interviews of patients, money (cost) ranked as the number one or number two factor (behind psychological or physical trauma) that prevented them from pursuing ART. Every aspect of high-tech treatment costs money: drugs, hormonal studies, ultrasounds, interpretation of results, professional fees, the operating room, freezing and thawing embryos, and sperm washing, to name a few.

You can’t completely begrudge infertility doctors and technicians for charging so much. Thanks to their knowledge and training, many infertile couples are getting pregnant. Certainly you want your doctor to be the best that money can buy. But you also wish the cost of infertility weren’t so steep. When presented with the bill, it is easy to succumb to the unfairness of it all.

Although there is no simple explanation for the inequities of life, you can, however, be encouraged to face the issue of infertility cost in a pragmatic manner, separating your grief over your infertility from a rational approach to money management.

For many couples, ART is simply too costly to try more than once, if at all. Other couples who can afford ART fail to investigate the various ways of keeping cots as low as possible. They may be embarrassed to work with their doctor and insurance company to enhance their reimbursements. Instead of fighting for what rights or services are theirs, they withdraw, give up, and mourn their predicament.

In conclusion, you are urged to Be Assertive and leave no avenue unexplored that might help you loosen ART’s financial pinch.