Insurance Comes Through
In July, we signed up for a new insurance program. It's one of the new so-called "consumer-driven" insurance programs, and it sounded like it would be ideal for us. It's turning out to be better than we thought.
One of the unique things is that you don't pay co-pays, ever. They start you off with a $1500 Health Reimbursement Account. Everything insurance related gets taken out of there first. If you don't use it up, it rolls over to the next year, and you yourself pay nothing out-of-pocket. Obviously, with a birth approaching, that doesn't apply to us. So after that money is used up, you have to pay $1500 of your own money toward a deductible. Not a big deal, as we set up our Flexible Spending Account to cover that. After all that, it works like a "normal" insurance company, covering 90% in-network or 60% out.
The nice thing is that you don't ever need referrals. If you think you need to go to a certain doctor, you go, and they cover it. Since we are having this baby at home with the help of the midwives at BirthCare, we were wondering how the insurance was going to handle this. Normally, the people at BirthCare require you to pay for everything up front, but we obviously wanted them to hit our HRA first, so that it would get used up, etc. So their finance guy calls up the insurance to figure out how to do it, and the insurance company says they will cover the home birth costs directly! So BirthCare is sending them the bill, and they will take care of anything. Now that's what I call consumer-driven. They realize that it'll be cheaper for them that we are taking the initiative and having the baby at home and avoiding the hospitals, and they're going to pay for it.
This was a huge relief for us, and obviously I can't recommend United Healthcare enough.