Episode 206: Building Better Benefits—for Bread Financial and Herself

Dan Bulger: She was just about to partake on a project at work that would significantly impact her journey. See, a big part of her job is to select and manage employer sponsored benefits. Around this time in her story, she and her team were in the process of searching for a vendor to provide fertility and family building benefits for Bread Financial associates.

Deanna Allison: At Bread Financial, one of the things that we’re always looking at is, are we solving the need? With any product we have, is there a need that we’re actually trying to solve for? My boss had been through a struggle with fertility 20 years earlier. Someone on our team had been through one about 10 years ago. And as we were venting about just, you know, it’s hard to pick specialists, it’s hard to know what to go after, and it’s hard not to be frustrated and hurt. It really became evident, no matter how long you’ve been doing this, or how long ago your journey might have been, patient experience is still the same. It’s a frustrating business. You walk into a doctor’s office and you’re going to see a list of procedures that price from $750 to $70,000 and the first question you tend to have is, what can you afford, or what does your insurance coverage look like?

Dan Bulger: Her team started investigating options. Prior to this, Bread Financial actually did offer coverage for fertility treatments. In fact, they were early pioneers in offering that kind of benefit, but the offering they had was limited and didn’t include a lot of support that she and the team knew people needed. Bread Financial ended up adding the Progyny fertility benefit, and Deanna was able to experience the benefit firsthand.Deanna Allison: Because of my age, right quality was probably the issue that we were dealing with. We would go for round two, I think I got 10 or 12 eggs in total. So again, I responded really well. And the same thing happened. All of them took fertilization, but none of them matured. So, when we went back to talk to him a third time, we just had a really honest conversation. If you could change something to make round three possibly better, what would that be? And he was honest, the odds aren’t great based on what we know right now, and there’s not a whole lot more we can change. We threw what we could at the egg quality issue, and I just asked, because I had done some research; that is donor eggs most likely our next option?

Deanna Allison: What I did love about this process is, unlike say, adoption or surrogacy, I got to carry the baby, meaning I got to control the environment. I got prenatal care under control. I’ve got food and diet and exercise and all those things which you want to have a good environment for your baby, where you can, right? And it was incredibly important to me to control what I could. And I realized, while I hadn’t really thought donor eggs would be for me along the way, it was probably the best fit for me, because I actually had more control than the other options would have given me in terms of a good outcome.It always feels good when you can match who you are to what you’re doing here on the benefit side and the people’s side of the house. So, for us, that experience, just getting it right. I was able to benefit personally, and that always feels good when you know you got it right for the people, because you’ve sat where they’re going to sit.