Everyone’s fertility journey looks different. That’s part of the reason why it’s so difficult to pin down the process and costs. So, I’m adding my voice to the choir here to express the experience my wife and I have been going through these past few years. Part 2 of this series focuses on our experience with Insurance coverage and the search for the right Fertility Clinic.

In Part 1 of our fertility journey series, I mentioned that we were trying to decide between attempting home fertilization or going through a fertility clinic. We ended up working with a fertility clinic from the start as opposed to performing at home fertilization. This was due to insurance restrictions that I had with my employer based plan at the time. Today’s post goes into some of the details of how we were impacted by insurance and how we found the right Fertility clinic for us.

Fertility Service Insurance Coverage

As part of my 2022 insurance plan, same sex couples had to prove through working with a fertility clinic that they were trying for at least 6 tries within a 12 month period prior to insurance picking up the tab. Performing at home insemination would not qualify, even with receipt of purchase and shipment of donor sperm. I found this frustrating because the success rates for IUI versus at home insemination were the same, while the cost differential was thousands of dollars.

Where we benefitted from the first and second curve balls we were thrown was actually from the change in my work insurance between 2022 and 2023. Because my surgery had happened in the fall of 2022, the first time we were able to try was in January 2023. My 2023 insurance did not have the same 6 month stipulation once they started working with a company called Kindbody. They would start paying right away, up to $25,000 in fertility services and up to $15,000 in prescriptions over the course of a lifetime.

If you are looking to start your fertility journey, I recommend going through all of your benefits to see what you can leverage.

Fertility Clinic

Since we are in the New Haven area of Connecticut, there are a good amount of Fertility Clinics nearby. That being said, we still needed to narrow it down as to the best fit for us. The first pass was based on looking at their websites, starting with the amount of information that they offered. The more information they provided upfront the more likely we were to book a consultation. We booked a total of 3 consultations with different clinics.

The first, Illume Fertility, seemed to be a good fit, but were the most expensive of the options. This was our first consultation, so we planned to go back if neither of our other options felt right.

The second, Yale Fertility Clinic, we did NOT click with the doctor we had in our consultation. She made several comments that felt judgemental about our circumstances, timeline, etc. She no longer works there, thankfully. However, a fertility journey is extremely personal to you and you want to have the right medical team working with you. Based on that meeting, this was not the team with whom we wanted to experience something so vulnerable. This ended up being a great decision since one year later, there was a disturbing scandal with this clinic.

The Right Fertility Clinic

Like Goldilocks, the third try was the right one. Uconn Fertility met our expectations with their team’s level of grace, understanding and practicality. We clicked with the folks we met right away. This would turn out to be a great thing since I ended up spending quite a bit of time with this team of the following year and a half or so. We started working with them in early 2022, obtained their approval of the donor sperm and set the first ultrasound appointment that July. Unfortunately, this was when we hit the second curveball in our fertility journey. I felt better knowing that we had the right team in place to get things resolved though.

Shortly after the first consultation, their financial representative reached out with a complete list of all expected costs. She also let us know that we qualified for their low income program. I was not expecting this, but the limitation they had was $175,000 in annual income. This took over 50% off the initial price for most of their services.

Next Steps

No additional costs were added in this part of this series, just many painstaking hours or research and phone calls. So to review, at this point our total costs were $14,070 for the donor sperm purchase.

In Part 3 I will cover the Intrauterine Insemination (IUI) process and costs.

Have you gone through fertility treatments before? What was your experience with insurance? Did you use a fertility clinic? Let me know in the comments below!

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