Hi,
I will be losing my father's health insurance, under which I was covered, now that I have changed my name. I'm 22 years old, only hold two extra help jobs(minimum wage, no benefits), and most of my expenses will be in rent and getting a new car--because he is taking that away from me too! I make about $1,000 a month. Just on a scale of 1-10, how screwed am I? 1 being I'm ok--everything is going to be alright, 10 being I should go jump in a hole and never come out.
Anyway, are there any trans friendly insurance companies out there that would cover me and my hormone treatment. Without insurance, I know that my hormones cost $60 a month, plus $250 about twice a year to see my doctor. So I'm actually wondering if it would be better to just be, gasp, part of the uninsured masses. And then when I get sick/in an accident just tell the doctors to let me die.
well for an option, you may be able to get medicare (which would give you medicare part d prescriptions) if you can show a doctor you have other mental or psychical problems. Beyond that I do know that UC Berkeley in California offers transgender covered insurance, someone else will have to tell you about private insurances cause i do not know for sure.
Unless you live in California, the only way to get HRT, SRS, et al to be covered under any insurer is to have such insurance thru your place of employment. Insurance companies do not cover transitions related expenses in their private individual policies. Only if your employer has it included in their company policy.
Oh... and you're going to need more than $1000 / month.
I was doing a lot of research on this last month because I'm coming off my mom's plan since I'm 26 now.
With private insurance I was running into extremely high costs. I've got some more stuff going on with me than just being trans* that I need care for, so my numbers are a little high maybe? But I was hearing numbers varying between $600-$800/month for plans with a lower deductible. None of the ones that I talked to had any sort of coverage for trans* health in my state though.
I know that if you're off of healthcare for 6 months you can apply for pre-existing condition insurance (I put a link below), which is way less than private insurance, but that requires being without for months so I dunno what to say there.
http://www.healthcare.gov/law/features/choices/pre-existing-condition-insurance-plan/index.html (http://www.healthcare.gov/law/features/choices/pre-existing-condition-insurance-plan/index.html)