Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Frustration with CHOP

Buy tickets to the fundraiser! (link for smartphones/iphones, they can't see the link on the right)

We were ready to get our first plane tickets to Philadelphia for August 30th, but it couldn't be that easy. The reason we need to go to CHOP is because they need to do our first set of prenatal appointments. However, the insurance lady is trying to tell us Melanie's vaginal delivery is going to cost us $100,000. Melanie says they do tons of deliveries at her job and maybe they bill out $ 13,000 a delivery. I have spoken to 2 moms who went to CHOP and their total billed for prenatal and delivery might have us paying $20,000 after Melanie's bad out-of-network coverage splits the bill with us. It just seems like the lady is trying to scare Melanie away. And she was saying the baby couldn't be under my (Brett's) better insurance, even though my insurance says from the day the baby is born it is on my insurance. Does CHOP not want us? I'm going to inquire further today but if it turns out they don't want to work with us then I guess we are going to have to go to Boston or Houston. It was a pretty frustrating day.

CHOP supposedly does 70 of these single ventricle procedures a year. They are averaging only 1 or 2 hours on bypass, and a much quicker surgery than other places. Quicker recovery time. There survival percentages are over 90%. They even have an interstage nurse dedicated to talking to us once a week between each surgery, collecting all of our weights, pulse ox's, etc. We are very impressed with CHOP, but we don't want to make this decision based on money, but there is a big difference between paying $40,000 total to paying $100,000 or $200,000.

Plus one of our bands dropped out of our fundraiser today, Louisiana Spice. Hopefully no one else drops out. We had a meeting last night and amazingly 20 people showed up, family and friends.

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