Ladies using donor eggs please come in

Oct14 · April 2009

Hello girls-

Well it is official. 1 follicle found. We are in the beginning stages of looking for a donor. I was wondering what the typical cost is, and.. is that covered by insurance? Any assistance would be very helpful.

RFBsbride · April 2009

Hi Oct14.... there are several ladies on this board that are using Donor Eggs and we're all at different points of the process.

It's tough to give a "typical cost" because there are a lot of different factors that go into Donor Egg. I can give you my breakdown however and maybe some of the other girls will as well and then you can really see what goes into DE.

You'll have to pay money to your Donor Agency (assuming you use an anonymous donor) for psychological and medical screening. For us, that cost was about $4800. You then have to pay a donor fee which can range from about $5000 to $8000 (ethically, a donor cannot ask for more than $8000 unless they have extenuating circumstances or they have been a proven successful donor in the past. Legally, a donor cannot ask for more than $10,000) DH and I have gone through 2 donor's so far (one failed her screening, the other had a poor response to her meds) and we've had to pay the donor agency fee both times. For our second donor, since she started stims, she got a portion of her donor fee (she does not get the full fee until retrieval has been completed.) You will also have to pay any travel expenses for the donor if you choose a donor that is not local to you. For us, our donor agency collects $5000 and holds that in escrow. Whatever money is not used, we get back. You have to pay for an attorney and your donor's attorney.

All insurance coverage is different, but most likely your insurance will not cover anything that pertains to the donor and will only cover things for you. So your b/w, monitoring, meds, etc may be covered but not your donor's meds, b/w, monitoring, etc.

Unfortunately, DE is kind of a double whammy for IVF because no matter how good your insurance is, you still have to pay for at least one person (although there are definitely insurance companies that will cover some of the donor expenses.)

So, after all is said and done, if you had absolutely NO insurance, the DE process could cost about $32K. I would check with your RE to see if they have a financial coordinator who can find out for sure what your insurance will cover or call your insurance provider yourself and get all the information you can about what your insurance offers.

Good luck!

militarywife2b · April 2009

Hi we are using donor eggs. My donor is a friend of mine so we didn't have to pay the donor fee or psychological testing. We are both military wives so her blood panel tests were covered by insurance. My clinic is also giving us a discount so we are paying 13,000.

Tomorrow there is a weekly check in for us donor ladies, you should check in .

hopecounts · April 2009

Generally the coverage is the same for DE IVF as regular IVF. If you hae coverage it's still covered, if not it isn't.

Typical cost of a cycle w. an in-house donor is roughly 20- 30,000. that includes donor fees and all the procdure and monitoring but not meds.

I cycled for ~ 12,000 at CNY, don't know if it worked yet. They are REALLY reasonably priced BUT their success rates aren't the highest.

Do lots of research and start thinking about how you feel about tell vs. no tell, known vs. anonymous, agency vs. clinic donors.

Good Luck.

BRSaugust20 · April 2009

Sorry you have to join our group, but please join the check-in tomorrow. We are also doing DE and we are looking for a donor now. I do have insurance that will cover the donor's monitoring and retrieval plus my drugs and the transfer. It may or may not cover the donor's drugs we will have to cycle to find that out.

We are using an unknown donor and combining donor agency fees, legal fees, screening fees, donor compensation, travel expenses (there will be some even if you use a local donor) - it will cost at least $20,000 outside of insurance.

I highly recommend talking to a therapist who specializing in IF to discuss donor eggs, telling versus not telling, etc. with before you get too deep into the process.

Good luck.

hopecounts · April 2009

Also seriously look for a proven donor who has donated and the recipient got a BFP, it can make things much easier and help the doctor optimize the cycle since he/she knows how she responds to stims.

That's probably one of the best pieces of advice I got in this process.

epphd · April 2009

Hi Oct, I'm sorry to hear your news.

DH and I had many treatment cycles under our belts, and could not fathom going into DE without some sort of "guarantee." Therefore, we chose a clinic that offers a shared risk program (look up the Attain program through integramed). We paid almost 2x the cost of one cycle, but have three fresh and unlimited frozen cycles to get pregnant. If we do not have a live baby at the end, we get 100% of our money back. Almost everything is covered, including donor compensation (our clinic has a large pool of donors to choose from) and all monitoring. The only thing that is not covered are the initial diagnostic tests (to qualify for the program) and meds. The total cost is around $35,000. It's a lot - don't get me wrong. And hopefully we just really overpaid since I got a BFP on our first cycle. But if I miscarry or have any problems, we can start up on a new cycle with no additional cost - and that was critical to us in going forward.

Good luck and I hope you join our check ins!

Oct14 · April 2009

Thank you all for your fantastic responses. Did anyone get a loan for this? Or did you use CCds? I found out the insurance covers all the medical, which is good. But I was wondering how you girls financed this.

epphd · April 2009

My insurance did not cover any of it, so we took out a health care loan from capital one. I believe our interest rate is 7.9% and the term is 4 years. It's a fixed payment schedule, kind of like a car loan. Unfortunately, I have heard the Cap1 is no longer doing this program, which is really a shame since they were the leaders in health care loans.

If you do use CCs, just be sure to be hypervigilant about payment. Our cards have gone to a policy where if you have more than one late payment per year (late by even 1 day), they jack up your interest rate to 20%+ and apply it retroactively. This just happened to us using a miles card. DH had made a payment on the closing date of the previous statement - which they applied to month preceeding, rather than the month to come. Suffice it to say we just paid the balance off to avoid the finance charges - but they are being really brutal right now.

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