You’ve navigated every part of the surrogacy journey and now – the practicalities after birth!
Enrolment with Medicare
Medicare requires any eligible newborn to be enrolled within 52 weeks of their birth. Having said that, it is always ideal to enrol as soon as possible in case baby needs any medical treatment.
When a baby is born, the hospital will provide the birth mother with a Newborn Child Declaration form. This form is then used to register the baby with Births, Deaths and Marriages and obtain a birth certificate. It is also used as evidence to enrol in Medicare before a birth certificate is issued.
The real struggle with this in a surrogacy arrangement is the Newborn Child Declaration form will have the surrogate’s name on it as the birth mother. This means that the surrogate and intended parents will need to work together to enrol baby in Medicare.
Whose Card?
It’s a bit of a guessing game. Medicare seems to have three ways of dealing with the issue:
- It lists the baby on the surrogate’s Medicare card only;
- It lists the baby on the intended parents Medicare cards;
- It provides baby with their own card.
Obviously where a surrogate and the intended parents live a distance apart, it is important that the intended parents have access to the Medicare card that lists the baby.
Our experience with enrolling with Medicare was very straight forward:
- We filled out the forms with our surrogate.
- Our surrogate signed the initial enrolment form which needed to be put in her name because the Newborn Child Declaration was in her name (this is an MS004 form) and lodged online.
- I then filled in a form to have our baby’s name transferred to my Medicare Card (MS011).
- This form was also signed by our surrogate and lodged with a copy of our surrogacy agreement online.
The result for us was – our baby was placed on our (intended parents) Medicare card.
If you are having difficulty getting baby listed on the intended parents Medicare card, I suggest that you telephone or visit an office together to advocate. Make sure you have your surrogacy agreement and parenting plan (if you have one) ready.
Waiting to Enrol in Medicare after Parentage Order is made
This wasn’t something we were prepared to do, but it is a personal choice.
Once a parentage order has been obtained and a new birth certificate issued, enrolling with Medicare should be straightforward as evidence of a new birth can also be provided to Medicare by providing a birth certificate.
