I am working through several years of medical expenses in
order to clean up my files for our health care reimbursement account. My health insurance plan is one that allows
me to set aside money for medical expenses.
These are “pre-tax” dollars, which one is then allowed to withdraw for
medical costs. As long as you pay for health care, you pay no tax on the money,
ever. So, this is a good deal for anyone
who has the financial wherewithal to put a chunk of change away. (Of course, it’s
just one more example of a public benefit program that benefits those who
probably need it least – the working premise being that you have to have sufficient
income to be able to set money aside for medical costs that you may not incur
for years – or ever. But that’s another
post for another time!)
In any case, we’ve benefitted from this program, and I diligently
save and eventually track all our medical expenses so that we can determine the
amount to withdraw each year. We don’t
always take money out, and we certainly do not match our withdrawals to our
expenses, line by line. That would be an
enormous data-tracking exercise. We tend
to do it when we need a couple thousand dollars. Since our medical expenses have been high the
past few years (accidents, surgeries for me, etc.) we have no trouble meeting
my deductible. That gives me an easy
benchmark for the amount we can withdraw. I don’t have to put all the documents into my
spreadsheet to know that they have exceeded my deductible amount, and with our
dental plan and Roger’s eyeglasses, it’s easy enough to confirm our costs are
over $4,000 a year. So if Roger asks what we can transfer from the account, it's easy to make a very good-faith estimate of a reasonable amount to take.
And what does that mean? It means that we’ve skated along like
that for several years, and I am now in the process of “catching up” on many
years of medical costs. How many? Well, the last tab in my spreadsheet was
2013! Yikes. Five years of medical data to input! Ay yi yi.
I have at least taken the time in prior years to sort and order the expenses
by date. So I know roughly how much is
there for 2014, 2015, and 2016. Ah, yes – 2016. That was the year of our big
bicycle trip, and hence our VERY big medical file following the accident that
ended it. So that year is in good shape, and since we were reimbursed by the
insurance company of the guy who hit us, we won’t be able to claim any of those
costs in this program, anyway.
But then there was that OTHER accident – the one that
happened on December 29, 2016. That one was on us, so to speak. And so here I
am, contentedly if somewhat belatedly keying in my expenses for things like
prescriptions and office visits for my trigger finger surgery and other fine
stuff like that in 2017 when I come across the bill for my little stay at Loma
Linda University Medical Center. Sigh. It just never goes away. The specter of
those events keeps coming up. When you least expect it, here it is again. Powee! – like hitting the pavement all over
again.
For me, at least – this was a “2-fer” – meaning that I was
basically in the “buy one, get one free” mode by that time in the medical
expenses year. The first accident, the one in Kingman, took me over my
deductible. So this one was pretty much fully paid by Kaiser. I had a $100
co-pay for my ER visit, and I think that’s it.
Not bad! If there’s any silver lining to be found in all of this, I
guess that is it. And when you are looking at piles of bills that total thousands of dollars, a silver lining is a nice thing to find.
