Help Aria Get Top Surgery

Hi, I'm Aria! That's me on the left.

Last year I decided I wanted to get top surgery, the reasoning split about 50/50 between gender reasons and the fact that my mother was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer at 32, which eventually killed her. Every birthday's a little spookier for me, so I figured it was time to see about fixing that instead of waiting around for the bombs strapped to my chest to destroy me lmao

We get our insurance through my spouse's employer, Cumberland University, and Meritain has a pretty extensive policy about trans health and I fit the criteria perfectly! So we went about getting this done as quickly as possible, which ended up being around ten months of jumping through hoops to get the insurance to clear.

Which it didn't! After some confusion about why the system was refusing to cover a perfectly valid case, we dug around enough to figure out Cumberland University has manually set up exclusions in its employee insurance for gender affirming surgery and procedures. After several weeks of discussions, they ultimately told us further research into transgender healthcare was needed before they could make a decision and that the denial will remain in place for now. For us this means the soonest our situation could change would be 2023, and there's no way of knowing if or when they may decide to change their policy, so we have decided to go on and try to fund the procedure on our own.

Essentially, the cost of the surgery would have been our deductible, $4,000, and that would have been unpleasant but perfectly manageable for us. Now, since we aren't being allowed to use the insurance we pay for, we have to pay over twice as much entirely out of pocket which is. Frustrating.

The full cost of the surgery is around $10,000 after everything and we're asking for the amount that was supposed to be covered by the insurance. I wasn't going to crowdfund for this because I thought insurance would cover it and felt like other peoples' surgery funds need it more but, well. If you feel so inclined, we'd really appreciate the help.

Thank you very much for reading this.