I have a love/hate relationship with my HSA. It does save me some money. Mainly because in years where I don’t get up to the deductible, I roll the account over and can reduce my contrbutions a bit.
One problem though is that its an administrative nightmare if you are not organized. And I am not.
I had to go in to the doctor three years ago for a suspected case of diverticulitis. It wasn’t thankfully.
After all the tests were done, I got a bill from the doc for the visit. A bill from the GI doc. A bill from the lab for my “samples”. A bill from the radiology group for the CT scan. A bill from the company that provides that radioactive crap you drink for the scan. A couple other bills that I think the hospital threw in for fun. It was hard to keep track of what everything was for and it didn’t help that my wife had to go to the doctor and I got bills for her as well.
After I thought I had paid all of the bills, I got a couple of past due notices so I must have missed a bill. So I had to log onto the account website and reconcile everything myself. One check hadn’t cleared yet and wasn’t on the site when I checked. So I ended up paying the hospital twice. They sent me a refund. but I can’t cash the check and keep the money. I have to deposit it in my personal account. Then I had to write a check to deposit the funds back into the HSA.
It would be nice if I had a a secretary, but no such luck.
Do you have some sort of odd eye issue that requires special glasses? Because unless you are getting fancy designer frames, a pair of glasses should cost you closer to $20, not $200.
Well, I’ll grant I could certainly go cheaper. A lot of the cost is in the frames. Still, with our VSP I pay probably about $50-$75 on the lenses themselves.
I don’t have any wacky eye conditions, just your basic near-sightedness.
My VSP covers photochromic lenses (yay!) but not high refractive index polycarbonate (boo!). So I upgrade on this to avoid wearing coke-bottles.
The rest is in the frames, fair enough. But I don’t want to go around looking like a Soviet carpet salesmen. And it’s just the nature of of me that I go through a pair of glasses once a year. I’m constantly taking them on and off (switching with safety glasses for work) and I tend to have my lenses pretty scuffed up after a year. I’ve gotten my current pair to last two years, but I absolutely need a new pair right now.
Take a look at buying your glasses online. I have had good luck with Zenni Optical. They have plenty of frames that look decent and the prices there are quite good.
Here in Canada, if you need something, you go see a doctor. All citizens are covered for anything that is necessary. (“Unneccessary” is stuff like plastic surgery) No matter what you need - no bills. I cannot imagine going through the crap you guys do just to get covered.
Yes, but what about waiting lists? They exist, but not for real emergencies. OTOH, a relative in NJ had to argue with Blue Cross before having his gall bladder removed. They said they would not cover it because a gallstone was a pre-existing condition, they take years and years to grow. A bit of yelling, and finally they agreed. Not much different than my wife’s 2-1/2 month wait in Canada, except we knew we were going to get the gall bladder operation and the cost (to us) would be zero.
Because the government here pays the bill, there’s no “one price for you who pay cash, another for Joe who pays 20%, a third for the insurance company”. (So when they knock 20% off, does the 80% cost or the 100% get applied to your deductible-so-far payment? It seems to me that 100% would be fraud. )
Our taxes are higher, but we don’t need to pay a few hundred a month extra nor do we need thousands in reserve for potential prolems. Our savings don’t go into health accounts - they go toward retirement. I will never have to sell my house or go bankrupt because of medical bills. It rarely matters which company you work for or what their benefits are; dental, prescription, and eyeglass coverage are nice but not golden handcuffs for most people.
Every civilized country has government-provided health care. The USA should join them.
They don’t remove younger people from the insurance pool on a national level, but on the level of an individual company. If the company was formerly offering an HMO and a PPO and a traditional fee for service, then added a high-deductible plan with an HSA, more young healthy people would probably take the HD/HSA plan. The insurance companies would find the risk pool in the other plans to be worse (based on age or experience or whatever) and those plans would become more expensive at that employer.
That’s not my experience. My HD plan saves me TONS of money by negotiating down the “rack rates” by anywhere from 10-25%. And I don’t pay up front, either. Doc submits the bill to my insurance, insurance re-prices it, doc sends me another bill with the re-priced amount, I pay it, until I hit my yearly deductible, at which point the insurance pays it.
Make sure you look into the HSA plans. I went the HSA route for a while until US Bank upped my minimum balance to $2,500 or else incur a $2.50 monthly fee. I’m a single 26 year old male and the policy literally never paid a single dime. No way was I going to get $2,500 in any reasonable amount of time so I changed plans. Also, not every bank has them available.
