I have United Healthcare for insurance and I don't think they cover gender affirming care. How can I get HRT? (self.asktransgender)

submitted 4 weeks ago by captainjaneway to c/asktransgender

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My insurance sucks. I've just been denied coverage for:

Therapy (I appealed that)
Dental work (out of network even though they "take my insurance")
Planned Parenthood gender affirming care meeting

Furthermore, my doctor's appointment with Doctor's on Demand was cancelled with no explanation (I was going to go with a primary care physician to ask some questions about HRT).

United Healthcare sucks and I need help. I've heard of DIY HRT but it sounds sketchy to me. I'm willing to get there, but I'd like to exhaust all possibilities before I go down that path. I picked Planned Parenthood because they seem like a safe space. My current primary care physician is sort of conservative coded. He made some comments at our last appointment that made me feel like HRT would be hard to acquire under his care or - in the very least - awkward.

I've looked at Plume and FolxHealth, which say they take my insurance, but I'm dubious. I feel like it'll be a bait and switch. They'll take my insurance, but I won't actually be covered and I'll end up paying an arm and a leg for boobs.

Anyone else have United Healthcare and have navigated HRT. I pay a decent amount for medical coverage under a PPO (PPOs tend to have larger networks). I would have thought HRT was easy to acquire since it's - essentially - a cheap medicine. But I'm running into road blocks early on that are making it difficult to figure out what to do. Should I just go through a primary care physician? Just make another appointment with Doctors on Demand? Can I just jump to FolxHealth or Plume? Is requesting Gender Affirming Care via Planned Parenthood the wrong way to go about this?

I hate insurance.

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[-] captainjaneway 4 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Thanks for the guide. It sounds like it's mostly a cost based issue then? The DIY route seems a bit more expensive than insurance, but it's fairly reasonable.

How do you handle injections? I feel like it'd be super hard to put a needle in me. I've never done something like that before.

Edit I watched a video on how to do it. Doesn't actually look too bad. I hate needles, but for some reason the 45deg. angle and pinching the skin made it seem less daunting.

[-] will_steal_your_username 5 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

You can come ask questions on the matrix if you want! Lots of people there with experience! (we have a HRT room)

I wrote a guide here on lemmy a while ago: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/22251406

And here are more links on DIY: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/19393848

Generally doing DIY should be pretty cheap if you go for monotherapy by doing injections

[-] captainjaneway 2 points 3 weeks ago

I can't join the Matrix server. When I try registering with the server chat.blahaj.zone and blahaj-20250508 I just get a 500 Internal Server Error response from the server. I tried different username/password combinations in case there was an issue with special characters, but nothing seemed to change. Instead I registered with matrix.org and was able to get accepted. I'm learning how to use Matrix, but I'm getting the hang of it a bit. I'll try and find the HRT room :)

[-] will_steal_your_username 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Oh? I've seen someone else have issues as well. Will bring it up with Ada.

I don't currently recommend making matrix.org accounts as they don't prioritize protecting their users from spam, but there are ways to deal with the spam by using certain clients and adding ban lists. Users with chat.blahaj.zone accounts get spam removed automatically thanks to Kaity and Ada.