Surrogate Health Insurance: The Ins and Outs of Surrogate-Friendly Insurance & a Comprehensive Guide to Helping You with Your Surrogate’s Health Insurance
Health insurance is difficult enough to understand on its own.
With legal jargon filling pages with information, most people typically skim through and call it good. When it comes to surrogate health insurance, the waters become even murkier.
Does their current insurance policy cover the surrogate mother and all of the tests and medications that she’ll need? Who pays for that insurance?
As someone who is looking to find a surrogate, you likely have a lot of questions about surrogate health insurance.
This article will discuss surrogate friendly insurance if it exists, and what the expectations are over health insurance for surrogacy in California.
Surrogate-Friendly Insurance: Do They Need It?
Initially, intended parents who are struggling with infertility may wonder if their surrogate mother even needs health insurance.
After all, the common belief is that they’re only carrying the baby full-term.
The answer is yes, they will need health insurance.
You likely wouldn’t want to be pregnant without insurance there to back you up in the event that something goes wrong. Your surrogate mother feels the same way.
While those who become a surrogate through our agency are healthy and fit, pregnancy can always create problems that were unforeseen. It’s just a luck of the draw on how easy the pregnancy is.
If there are any complications, then a health insurance policy is there to lend a hand in paying for the costs of dealing with those complications.
A surrogate mother who is taking part in surrogacy in California has to undergo numerous fertility treatments in order to prepare her body for implantation of an embryo.
These fertility medications are not always covered by insurance. In fact, only a few states place pressure on insurance companies to offer insurance covering infertility problems.
Those states are California, Arkansas, Delaware, Connecticut, Illinois, Hawaii, Maryland, Lousiana, Montana, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Ohio, Texas, and West Virginia.
Even those states vary on how much pressure they place on insurance companies and their requirements for what should be included in the policy.
California is one of the few states who insist that their companies offer infertility coverage to their clients.
And though infertility treatments may be covered to a point for intended parents and their own treatment- fertility treatment for their surrogate mother could be another matter altogether.
Fertility drugs are also an important part of surrogacy. After intended parents find a surrogate, the surrogate then has to be given multiple drugs in order to prepare their body for the embryo transplant.
These drugs first slow down their cycle.
The goal is to match the surrogate’s menstruation cycle with the time of ovulation. The body may not recognize the embryo and choose to purge it if the embryo is transplanted during a time when the body should not become pregnant–or at least not pregnant as easily.
How Does IVF Work With Surrogacy?
Typically, IVF treatment for surrogates will be paid and fronted by the intended parents prior to the treatment of the surrogate.
Surrogate health insurance—whether “friendly” or not toward surrogacy, will cover their care after the surrogate mother is released from care of the fertility clinic. The fertility clinic of the parents will be paid for with a cycle to transfer and a few weeks after transfer with the surrogate mother.
There will be blood tests and pregnancy tests, otherwise known as “monitoring” that may or may not be covered by the surrogate’s health insurance. This is regularly a toss-up as to whether their health insurance even if it were friendly toward surrogacy, due to the fact that fertility care in general is not usually covered by healh insurance if it is not the baby of the surrogate.
While some insurance plans do cover in-vitro fertilization, you’ll likely find that most traditional insurance companies do not, and it will likely only cover for treatment done with the intended parents only.
As such, IVF at a fertility clinic is not always covered by insurance, and almost 100% of the time the treatement of your surrogate at your chosen fertility clinic near you will not cover your surrogate.
However, your surrogate should still have health insurance coverage.
Another reason that surrogates need health insurance is because of the birth process. Birthing can be problematic sometimes. Whether they’re receiving a C-Section or delivering the body naturally, complications can arise.
These complications could prevent her from being able to become a surrogate again in the future. Surrogates should have that policy to protect them in the event that something happens during birth.
Surrogate Friendly Insurance: What Is It?
Now that you understand why surrogacy and a surrogate requires health insurance, you need to know exactly what surrogate insurance entails.
Surrogate insurance is basically a health insurance policy that covers the medications, treatments, blood tests and birth of a surrogate. It’s similar to a policy that covers pregnancy. Some policies might also include maternity leave and others may not.
Like all policies, each one is different dependent upon who the company offering it is and the individual.
Certain individuals, for example, may be able to receive a lower price on their policy or with additional benefits than others. Health insurance is picky as you might already know after dealing with your own personal health insurance plan.
You can examine your own health insurance policy to see if they offer coverage for infertility and third-party options.
Some of the items to look for are coverage for fertility diagnoses, fertility treatments, full fertility coverage, medication coverage stemming to fertility drugs, monitoring, fertilization procedures, and genetic screening and testing. If the policy does not include any or all of these factors, then it is likely not a good choice for those who are looking to do surrogacy.
Many people rely on Medicaid for their health insurance.
While Medicaid can cover a lot of health problems, it does not cover fertility treatments. This includes surrogacy. They don’t even cover the ability to freeze your eggs or embryos.
So, if you have Medicaid, you are going to need to find a different health insurance policy to cover your surrogate.
Surrogates may have a health policy already but the policy might not cover pregnancy in terms of being a surrogate.
The legal jargon in their policies can inform them how the company treats third-party pregnancies. Because third-party pregnancies are still a relatively new thing, many companies haven’t quite figured out how to cover it yet or have outright excluded it in the surrogate’s current health insurance policy.
Surrogate Insurance Review
One of the main benefits of hiring our California surrogacy agency is that we are very detailed with each surrogate’s profile.
We closely monitor the health of your surrogate, and we also pay a third party to independently review the entire health insurance policy of the surrogate before recommending that we use their policy for the surrogate process. We make sure that the policy either covers surrogacy outright or ascertain whether the surrogate’s policy will not cover surrogacy.
It’s imperative that you hire a competent surrogate agency that reviews surrogate’s health insurance prior to moving forward toward matching with a surrogate.
Myths Of Surrogate Insurance
There are a lot of myths surrounding surrogate insurance. Let’s take a look at some of these:
#1. Surrogate friendly insurance is easy to obtain
Most traditional health insurance companies do not cover surrogates. Again, this is because they don’t know how to cover it, or have not developed language to ensure that is it properly covered. They typically treat it as a covered pregnancy but that isn’t the case with a third-party pregnancy.
#2. Surrogates don’t need health insurance
This is also false. Every surrogate agency requires a surrogate to have an insurance policy for the birth and monitoring of the surrogate. This covers everyone involved and ensures that expenses can be paid related to the pregnancy.
#3. Surrogates already have an insurance plan
Depending on the life circumstances of your surrogate, they may or may not have a pre-existing health insurance policy. It is not a requirement for your surrogate to have a current health insurance policy. It is required for parents to pay for a health insurance policy whether it is their current policy or a separate policy that has to be obtained for the process of the birth.
#4. If I wait long enough, I will find a surrogate with surrogate friendly insurance
Many intended parents think that if they wait, a surrogate with surrogate-friendly insurance will approach them or be matched with them. This isn’t the case either. It’s difficult to find a surrogate with a policy that explicitly covers surrogacy. The likelihood of finding a surrogate with this type of policy will most likely cause more of a wait than any intended parent is willing to wait since about 1 out of 9 surrogates will have such a policy. You’ll likely be waiting for a long time.
If you are an intended parent looking for a surrogate, it is better to work the cost of a surrogate’s health plan into your budget than to wait for a surrogate that has a pre-existing surrogate friendly policy. Regardless of the prevalent social-media narrative that it is something parents should look for and wait for, finding a surrogate with a health insurance policy that is surrogate friendly is extremely hard to find and a sort of “diamond in the rough.” Count your blessings if you have found a surrogate, or are matched with a surrogate who has this type of policy- but always count on needing to pay for her to have the policy needed to cover the pregnancy.
#5. A “surrogate friendly” policy will cover all of the cost
Even in the event that a surrogate will have a surrogate-friendly insurance policy, it is likely that the policy may still have a large deductible, or some of the treatments will not be covered as expected.
For this reason, we usually suggest a “surrogacy contingent” policy that will cover the surrogate in the even the surrogate-friendly insurance policy does not deliver as expected.
You’ll likely find that an insurance policy can omit a certain part of the process, or come back to the intended parents after the birth and ask for more money if they find out that it was a pregnancy had by IVF or surrogacy. They most likely will not cover fertility medications, for example, or even the birth itself.
How Surrogate Agencies Help
Clearly, surrogate insurance can be difficult to navigate.
This is why it’s prudent that you utilize a surrogate agency in California not just to find a surrogate but also to utilize the services that we provide in sourcing a surrogacy friendly insurance policy for your surrogate. An agency like ours has connections to companies that provide surrogate insurance.
It begins with our agency taking an in-depth look at the health of the surrogate. Our agency requires that all of our surrogates have had at least one healthy and successful birth before joining.
After that, we have them go through numerous other examinations to ensure that they are healthy. This helps them qualify for better insurance policies.
Once we are assured that they are healthy individuals, we then work with our partners and affiliations to find a policy that best fits them. By the time a surrogate is matched with intended parents, the insurance policy should be ready to be used by the surrogate and the intended parents.
Intended Parents Should Not Worry About Surrogate Friendly Insurance
Through using our agency, intended parents don’t have to worry about finding an insurance policy for their surrogate.
We handle that headache-inducing task for you. Instead, you can just focus on finding the surrogate that is perfect for your family. All of the legal details are handled by us and the surrogate attorneys that we utilize.
In some cases where a policy is needed, you should expect to add $20,000 or $30,000 to the cost of the surrogate.
This is because the price of insurance can sometimes stem around $1,000 a month if not more. That amount is calculated into the surrogate’s profile that you select, so you can be prepared for it from the start. We will never blind-side you with the added cost of a surrogate’s health insurance after matching—Made in the USA Surrogacy will match you based on your wants and needs, and we are upfront with the costs associated with the surrogate you may intend to match with.
Utilize Our Surrogacy Agency
There are innumerable benefits that you receive when you hire Made in the USA Surrogacy.
Rest easy at night after the long and stressful endeavor you most likely have endured up till this point by trusting our surrogate agency.
Among those is knowing that your surrogate will have an effective and full-coverage insurance policy. By placing your trust in our hands, you can be assured that everything is handled and covered.
Please contact us today to find a surrogate and start your surrogacy journey!
