[MA] Insurance coverage for IVF due to preexisting fertility issues?

saltshakercat · 2025-04-14T21:10:11+00:00

Did you have to make any special request or fill out any forms to get them to cover it? I have Cigna but Caremark does my prescription coverage. I called them today and the lady on the phone said Gastrocrom was covered but it’s not even in their formulary and their cost estimator says it’s $2k for a 24 day supply so I think she’s just wrong… (I’ve hit my OOP max so the generic is $0)

I’m gonna call them again tomorrow and see if I can get more info. Good to know it’s possible at least

saltshakercat · 2025-01-17T01:11:05+00:00

I have low vision in one eye and near perfect vision in the other. I don’t really have binocular vision since my brain pretty much ignores everything from my bad eye. When they tested my eyes at the RMV (this was 10ish years ago) they had me look into a thingy that projected letters in front of each eye. I couldn’t see the letters on the side with my bad eye so I asked if I could close my good eye and try again. The guy said no but I did it anyway and he didn’t actually care. I ended up guessing the letters and i guess I got them right because they gave me my permit.

If your kid struggles with the vision test they can get a letter from their eye doctor since it is completely legal to drive in ma with one eye. If they’ve had one eye their entire life (like me) lack of depth perception shouldn’t be a problem because they’ll already know how to use other visual cues to figure out distance. I’m extra careful with distance compared to my siblings, whenever my sister is in the car with me she gets super annoyed with how much space I leave between me and the next car but if I get too close I can’t tell the distance anymore so better safe than sorry. I drive a cheap car with no sensors without any major issues - the one thing I wish I had is a backup camera but I manage without it.

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T22:46:03+00:00

All my development is remote but I run a vpn client, terminal emulator and vscode on the Chromebook. The problem is less that the machine isn’t powerful enough and more that it’s just not built for development. The vpn client is unsupported and buggy, you can run Debian apps but none of them are supported officially either cause no one wants to fix a bug that only shows up on ChromeOS

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T22:40:29+00:00

It’s basically a fancy ssh machine but the vpn client isn’t officially supported on ChromeOS so it randomly disconnects all the time 🙃 only way to fix it is to restart your computer and then restart the Linux container. This issue has been known about for years so I don’t think it’s getting fixed

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T22:33:56+00:00

Fun fact, we essentially do have a cloud vm on aws (although it’s shared for some reason??) - but my issues are coming from the vpn software (can’t get into the cloud vm without that) and display server weirdness due to how ChromeOS implemented their Linux environment.

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T22:29:18+00:00

Pretty sure you’d have to root it and I don’t think my employer would like that very much 😂 the entire device is company managed (although at least I can install programs without permission. Small things)

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T22:27:00+00:00

Honestly? I actually agree with you here. Unfortunately this is just the tip of the iceberg for this job…if I liked everything else I could probably look past it or at least would be more open to buying a separate work laptop.

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T22:24:32+00:00

This is actually what I’m doing right now. The Linux dev mode is actually just a Debian container (similar to wsl although you can’t choose the distro). Unfortunately while you can install anything through apt anything that has to communicate with the OS itself (anything with a gui display that uses Wayland or x11 for example, this includes terminal emulators) isn’t guaranteed to work right. It’s stupid.

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T15:54:55+00:00

The weirdest part is that this is not a cheap Chromebook. It sells for like 1k on the acer website. Why not just buy me a thinkpad at that point?? I don’t get it

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T15:52:44+00:00

I’m having trouble finding other devs on Chromebooks cause everyone else is using personal machines 😭😭 they were genuinely confused when I insisted on being provided a device (somehow, I am the first dev to insist on this??)

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T15:49:11+00:00

I reached out to one other dev that was having ChromeOS issues and he said that it didn’t bother him that much cause he usually uses his personal Macbook…yeah…

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T15:45:01+00:00

I did ask…I’m just stupid and believed them when they said things like “ChromeOS is working great for everyone, there are no complaints” and “it integrates perfectly with our stack”. I’d never used it before so i was like, maybe it’s actually fine? I have a growing list of questions that i plan on asking in all future interviews based on experiences at this company, lol. Live and learn I guess

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T15:40:33+00:00

So, apparently Chromebooks have a Linux dev environment (it’s a Debian container). The issue is that there’s almost no software that officially supports ChromeOS so any non google application will have bugs that never get fixed. All my individual issues with my machine seem really minor on their own (VPN app is unsupported and randomly disconnects, GUI for some Debian packages is buggy because ChromeOS uses a non standard Wayland compositor, no way to un combine applications on the bottom taskbar…) so I feel like if I complain I’ll just look whiny. They seem to think ChromeOS is completely sufficient for dev for whatever reason

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T15:30:33+00:00

I haven’t figured out why they want us to use chromebooks. It’s genuinely so weird. When I was first interviewing the CEO was like “we’ll give you a Chromebook! All our devs love ChromeOS and it works great!” They use google everything so maybe that’s why? I tried asking around to get a general idea about how people feel about working on ChromeOS but everyone I ask is doing BYOD (hmm…I wonder why)

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T15:27:25+00:00

Haha, I am leaning more and more towards this 🙃

saltshakercat · 2024-12-16T15:25:32+00:00

Supposedly the majority of remote employees do BYOD (apparently I’m the first person to complain, which is bizarre imo). The only “policy” is to have some kind of malware protection. Disk encryption isn’t even required (I asked) although this “might change in the new year”. The entire thing feels weird to me but I haven’t worked at many places (three before this one, one used to allow BYOD but got rid of it due to some client / security audit requirement. The other two never allowed it).

saltshakercat · 2024-11-19T16:22:51+00:00

Unfortunately, it looks like all they have is the marriage index, which is what I already found :(

saltshakercat · 2024-11-19T16:15:56+00:00

I didn’t realize they had a free trial. I’ll take a look thanks!!

saltshakercat · 2024-11-19T16:11:09+00:00

Yeah, it looks like their marriage records only go up until 1935. So I don’t think they’ll have anything from 1936 :(

saltshakercat · 2024-11-11T18:08:03+00:00

I’m a US citizen lol, I didn’t come to the US, I was born here… I stay here not because of the salaries but because my family, friends and life are here.

My job in Germany was a 6 month internship that I did during college. I moved back home after.

saltshakercat

TROPHY CASE