Zatera Ul

Well, it seems that the chain of miracles and $$$$ repairs that kept our car running is going to continue unbroken for a little longer….God came through with the miracle this time (by allowing us to get the car to the mechanic JUST BEFORE it would have died, and actually a little after it should have died) and we coughed up the $$$$. It’s good; winter in Minnesota with a baby on the way is not the best time to start going car-free.

[Break to shake my fist at the sky; with that repair we paid almost two dollars in sales tax toward the new stadium in Minneapolis. That we didn't even get to vote against because we lived in St. Paul at the time.]

Also, we’ve found out that our lovely HMO is going at pay, maybe and at most, $500 for my prenatal care with our midwife. ($0 for the home birth, for sure.) That’s another thing that’s been going very well and very poorly at the same time. At the beginning of the year, we elected to put half the cost of the midwife’s fee into our flexible spending (health-care) account, since we were not sure if or when I would get pregnant. That works out nicely to cover prenatal care for this year. The problem is that next year, we’ll get socked with the $1000 out-of-network deductible AGAIN, so we’ll have to set just as much aside for the remaining prenatal care, and for the birth. I used to think Medica was all right, but that was back when I was single and never, ever went to the doctor. I didn’t learn it was an HMO until this pregnancy.

Also, looking back, in the past two years or so our health insurance benefits have changed quite a bit. Skyrocketing health care costs -> eroding benefits. We started with HealthPartners, and an individual out-of-network deductible of $500. That was the year that OLC was born. They covered our midwife as an out-of-network provider without any squawking. The next year, the deductible went up to $1000, but we didn’t come anywhere close to meeting it. This year, the company changed over to Medica Choice, $1000 deductible, and it’s unclear whether they’ll pay for an independent midwife at all. Medica’s web site suggests not, but the Certificate of Coverage is unclear. We’ll just have her bill them and see what happens. Her biller said that there was a state statute that they were required to cover care from any licensed provider, but I don’t see it clearly spelled out there. (Minnesota statutes can be found here; interesting reading.)

The silly thing is that our midwife does all the same stuff that a CNM would. And that it’s safest for me to have care from someone that will come right to my house for the birth. If I had to go to the hospital, I would labor at home as long as I could, make MFH stop on the way to the hospital for takeout (so that I’d be sure of getting something substantial to eat after the birth; I have a big beef about this lingering from our hospital transfer last time), and try hard to push the baby out just as the car was pulling up to the hospital. Against that scenario, home birth is a LOT safer. That’s why I’m loath to switch to an in-network provider even though we end up paying so much more out of pocket (up front, at least; it’s not like hospital interventions never cost $$$$ and worse).

One thing that MFH noted once is how much more satisfying it is to just pay for your health care yourself. After hours and hours of wading through documents written in Insurance (which is not English, but a dialect unto itself), I wholeheartedly agree. We also had a short discussion about human health care vs. car health care. I said that we were paying more for our car’s health care than we did for our own, and he pointed out what a hassle it would be for us to have to deal with an insurance company every time we got it fixed.