Elaine, The amount QFG told you, you would be OOP, do you know if that includes your bed fees? Your basic hospital cover would cover bed and theatre fees wouldn't it? During our cycle last year the day theatre fee was approx $795 and bed for transfer was listed as $240. Don't know if the prices have changed for the theatre and transfer fees? That could be a nice amount that you don't need upfront if your health insurer pays out for that.

I do have the new prices for a stim cycle, will go find them....

ok, IVF cycle is now $5830. or if you have to do an IVF/ICSI cycle, it is now $6210 This amount is payable upfront. I think you pay it when you pick up your meds to start your cycle. We live quite a distance from QFG, so they said just to make sure that I had paid before we went in for EPU.
They tell you that you have to be able to carry this cost for about a month. They will send you a receipt when you pay, but it will not have the medicare item numbers on it for you to claim from medicare. I think we got our actual receipt with item numbers about 2 weeks after egg pick up. It was another week before we could get to the closest medicare office, and they did the refund by bank transfer which only took a couple of days.

The amount they told you, you would be OOP, i think is the amount you will be OOP after medicare reimburses you. Our QFG paperwork said $1845 OOP with Top PHI, and we were a little less because we already had a small amount towards our safety net.
I think the amount they estimate OOP, does not consider the safety net, as everyone could be sitting at different amounts with it, so they assume for everyone that you are starting out with a safety net balance of $0.

When you have your meeting with the nurse next week, make sure you completely understand everything, as it is so overwhelming when they hand you all the paperwork. we had our interview over the phone and our nurse was an absolute gem, she went through every piece of paper in our pack, read it out and explained it all to us. She was fantastic at explaining the costs to us, as it was just so mind blowing to see all these figures! The fees will have some medicare item numbers listed on it, so you can ring your PHI and ask them if they pay out on them or not. I took the piece of paper into our PHI and asked them if they would pay out on those item numbers or not.

Hope I haven't babbled on too much and confused you.

Nic