Good morning Kossacks and welcome to Morning Open Thread.
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True to form, my employer is trying to save money by changing our health insurance. Now, I don't have a problem with them wanting to save money, and I'll have to say that they do it in a very responsible way. We have an insurance committee that goes through this every year, looking at the expenses and insurance usage, and they get advice from a professional insurance broker. No quibbles there. We've even had the same policy for two years in a row, which is unusual given the economic circumstances. I don't even have a problem with the policies they are offering - I can keep my same policy with a flexible spending account, or I can switch to a "High Deductible" insurance policy and open a health savings account.
Let me digress here for those of you who might not know about these accounts. Both flexible spending accounts and health savings accounts are tax advantaged accounts which can be used for paying medical expenses. I've been using a flex account for years and saving myself a ton of taxes in the process. The difference between the flex and health accounts is that with the flex account, what you don't use at the end of the calendar year is lost, but you have access to the full amount at any time, so if you max it out early you can still get the funds and just keep paying up through payroll deduction. With the Health Savings Account on the other hand, the money is always yours, so if you don't use it, you still have it. You can get interest on it, or even invest it, and it grows every year like an IRA. However, you can only spend the amount of money in it at the time. For example, say I have $3000 taken out of my paycheck pre-tax every year for this purpose, starting on August 1. If I have a bill of $3000 on August 15, I can get reimbursed immediately with the Flex account, but I'd have to wait until all the money was in an HSA before getting reimbursed.
So, back to my quandry. I was the one who suggested the health savings accounts to the insurance committee in the first place. I know that the max for flexible spending accounts was going down to $2500, while you could put up to $3100 in an HSA. The high deductible account would even be far less money out of my pocket than the other account, believe it or not. I spent over $9000 last year for my medical care, which is $6000 more than the "out of pocket maximum" that my policy claimed. This is because that policy didn't cover prescription or doctor co-pays.
All that boring preamble to say that I really wanted to open a health savings account. I really did. But here's the deal.
Our insurance year goes from June 1 to June 1. Our contract year, and therefore my Flexible Spending Account deductions, goes from August 1 to August 1. My new insurance would kick in two full months before my Flexible Spending account goes away. I called the IRS, and NO, even if there is no money left in my flex account, I cannot fund a health savings account. I have no problem with that.
Except... I have another doctor's appointment on June 4. Port flush, check up with the doctor, and a bone shot that costs about $1900. (And get the results of the PET scan, done on May 28th - old insurance!) If I don't have an HSA in place before June 4, I can't even reimburse myself later. When I called the IRS, I was told that I could OPEN an account, but I just couldn't FUND it. So the search begins to find a bank that will let me open an account with no money. Yeah, right. I've got some leads, and some connections, so I may be successful. When I asked the HR person at work why they didn't just start the new insurance on August 1, she said that the insurance person had a lot of other accounts and was really busy, so she was trying to help her out. What a lame reason. That's the insurance person's JOB after all, isn't it??
What it boils down to is that you have to be part mathematician, part magician, and part soothsayer to figure out insurance these days. I know I'm damned lucky to even HAVE insurance, and I feel extremely lucky to have the funds to pull off the switch if I choose. If any of you have experience with this kind of stuff, I'd like to hear it. I have to decide in a day or two what to do. It makes me want to have a really big glass of wine right now. It makes me feel like this:
Sorry to bore you today. What do people WITHOUT insurance do?
Anyway, jibber jabber away. I'll probably oversleep as I usually do. I so used to be a morning person!