Get your Insurance to Cover your Doula
Welcome to my Tips, Tricks, and Tools blog! A place for me to share all of the different ways I’ve found to make pregnancy, birth, parenthood and birth-worker life that much easier! Today I want to talk about one of the biggest reasons people don’t hire a doula, cost.
Now, I know this is may be a bit awkward.
After all, I am a doula who charges my worth and I highly encourage other doulas to do so. A quality doula puts in an incredible amount of work into each and every client, not only spending most of their lives on-call and therefore unable to travel or go out with friends, but also keeping up with the latest trainings and evidence based research. They are available to drop everything at anytime to meet you in your birth space and stay until you feel ready for them to leave, weather that be a few hours or a few days. If this level of dedication sounds like something you want, you are going to need to pay for it. Or do you?
KC Women’s Ministry just wrote a great piece called “Get your Doula Services Covered by Insurance” and I have to say, this is an incredible win-win. Your doula gets a living wage and you just might at least some of the costs covered by a company you are paying premiums to anyway!
Just how much your doula is covered, if at all, is going to greatly depend on your insurance company.
Lindsey Britton of KCWM writes, “Please note all insurance companies are different and policies within each company are different. So, while you and someone you know may both have Insurance Company A, more than likely you are both covered under different policies so their plan’s coverage of doula’s may look different than yours.”
According to SBD (Kelli Way, ICCE, CD(DONA) 1998, the source Lindsey quotes in her guide, your journey to getting covered could take as little as three steps!
Call your insurance company while still pregnant to see if they routinely cover doulas. Regardless of if they say yes or no, you can move onto step two.
Have your doula send you an invoice and pay it in full. Now, I know this feels counterintuitive, but stick with me.
Submit your invoice to your insurance company for reimbursement. If your insurance company routinely covers doulas, you should be done here and receive your answer within a month.
If you are denied, this is where the real work gets going. Get out your typing fingers and write some letters! Your doula and practitioner (Midwife, OB, ect) can submit letters with you!
Learn more about what to do if your insurance is denied by clicking the picture above!
Thank you so much for reading and as always,
God Bless!
