Posts from — December 2008

It has been a busy, busy December. I am looking forward to a new year…
Meanwhile, apologies to you gals for not keeping you updated. Here are what has happened (aka alibis):

- Decorated our house, by myself for the first time
- Put together our annual letter and sent it out (probably to about 100 of them, mostly to the US but also to 7 other countries)
Canada, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, India, Germany, Malaysia,
- Prepared for Christmas party at home (I have now successfully cooked turkey successfully twice!)
- Bought and prepared gifts for the immediate family.
- Partied/Dined from the 21st to the 24th
- Visited my sister and the rest of the family in Canada
- Surprise, surprise… Had our 1-day work-up in CCRM

Yes, after a 1-day work-up in CCRM, we are now in the Denver International Airport waiting for our return flight. I will write more about it in the next posts

Knowing the upfront cost for multiple IVF cycles, with a discount and a refund, is useful for those of us who don’t want to be surprised.

Theoretically, doing the shared risk plans in the best/famous clinics sounds like a good plan. There are 3 caveats I can think of though:

1. When transferring to these clinics, there are a couple of specialized pre-cycle tests that are required and the cost could easily stack up. C’s 1 day work-up costs about $2,300-$3,600 out-of-pocket. It would be good to have infertility diagnosis coverage.
2. Again, I am reminded that it is not unusual to have no blast that makes it to freeze! Still, based on the math, there are certain outcome-based/refund packages that would still be financially beneficial even if no FET was provided.
3. If your IVF protocol is not the vanilla-flavor kind, then there are other costs that may be unaccounted for. The coverage of the various shared risk plans are pretty standard - excludes medicines, pre-cycle testings, special procedures such as ICSI, PGD/PGS, CGH, services provided by other facilities, etc - but each provider has its own twists, so it may be helpful to identify what aspects are of most important to you and compare those aspects.

There you have it. I hope these set of post cut through the clutter and gave you some information that you can use. If it did, leave me a comment to let me know. If not, at least, I got to organize my thoughts!

As usual though, these previous 3 posts are in no way complete so you will have to some more detailed research that is relevant to your case.