February 16, 2015
Effective Jan. 1, 2011, distributions from health FSAs and HRAs will be allowed to reimburse the cost of over-the-counter medicines or drugs only if they are purchased with a prescription.
This change to the FSA/HRA rules was a real downer.
I use quite a lot of OTC stuff for my chronic pain and it’s not cheap. Thermacare heating pads, for example, are great and last 8-12 hours but a pack of two or three costs anywhere from $10-26. A week of back or shoulder pain could cost $75 just to keep heat on, and it’s rare for the pain to be confined to a single area. Usually it’s one half of the body, right or left side.
To a more astute person, there is an obvious solution so I confess, I totally missed the obvious here.
OTC medications aren’t allowable unless you have a prescription for them. I read that as: if the pharmacy didn’t fill it as a prescription then it wasn’t eligible. I was wrong.
I’ve been doing this with my massages for the chronic pain, but it didn’t occur to me til recently that the same thing would work for the numerous OTC items I’ve had to buy for prenatal and pregnancy related conditions: the letter of medical necessity!
If it’s for any kind of treatment that your doctor is aware of, or if your doctor is happy to fulfill such requests, then all you’ve got to do is ask for a letter stating that these items are being used for treatment.
Make it really easy for your doctor to fill in a form letter by providing the list of OTC meds and send a copy of that letter in with your receipts.
We’ve spent a significant amount on OTC meds and supplies during this pregnancy, it was awesome claiming it back.
Go forth, my friends, and save your effective tax rate in OTC FSA costs!
August 6, 2011
After nearly three weeks of frustrations, run arounds, failed attempts and unanswered requests, I finally managed to get a prescription filled at my local Kaiser pharmacy.
To add insult to injury, it cost an extra $10. I nearly said something but before I could, the clerk ringing up my order mentioned casually, “you know, it’s cheaper if you order online.”
Wait, what?
“Yes, I noticed that this was more expensive and was just about to ask about that since I normally always order online. This was just thanks to all the trouble I’ve been having in getting this particular order filled.”
Not in the mood to explain the whole thing, even though he asked to hear the story, I glossed over the details and got to the good part: why exactly was the online order cheaper??
He explained: to encourage people to use the mail order service, when they order a 3 month supply, one month of the regular co-pay of $10/month is discounted.
!! You mean to tell me that the price I’ve been getting when I ordered online wasn’t a regular price, it was a discount?? (You had better not tell me that they’re going to take it away at some point, either.)
Honestly.
I’m happy that my busy life + laziness has been saving me at least $20/every three months for the past couple of years but if they wanted to change behavior shouldn’t they have been trumpeting this little detail from the rooftops instead of handing out tote bags when people say they’ll try ordering with mail delivery?
Would a 33% discount plus the added convenience of having your medication delivered by mail be incentive enough to convert you if you normally physically pick up your own prescriptions?
And in this day and age of having groceries, baked goods, and just about anything else you can think of delivered, why on earth would you need to be incentivized to have your medication delivered?
Who LIKES sitting in a creepy pharmacy smelling of astringent and urine waiting for their prescriptions to be filled? (Maybe that’s just mine. But still. Every pharmacy feels slightly creepy.)
November 23, 2008
I’ve been MIA for a bit; life has been a blend of all kinds of hectic, stress, and demotivation.
My doctor hunted me down, or his nurse assistant did, and made me come in for an appointment on Friday. This is how you know we’re grown up now: I may avoid the doc, but I’ll still take a day off, and go in knowing that I’m going to get poked with a needle. Back in the day, you couldn’t even get me in the car if I thought a doctor’s visit was in the offing! So yes, I’m all mature now. And I’ve got a quarter sized bruise where the phlebotomist more interested in gossiping with her fellow labbies jabbed me for several tubes of blood, and my left arm is still sore from the flu shot. They’re covered by my insurance, but I didn’t know that until this year because I avoid unnecessary shots like the plague. I still have to see the optometrist and the dentist.
On the way home, I dropped in on a girlfriend who has a brand new baby: only 6 weeks old! She was tiny. And very cute. I meant to spend an hour with her and go get some work done but she invited me to her girls-only lunch, so we sushied until one pm. [$18.50] My share should have been less as the other girls got $2 drinks each and I drank water, but s’ok. I haven’t seen them in many moons, and the opportunity to play with an itsy-bitsy baby was worth the detour.
Since I’m never in town on a weekday, I stopped into my salon to have my unkempt eyebrows groomed, my lady says that business is down about 50%! For folks who rent their station in these salons, that has got to hurt. [$12]
Last stop was for 4 hours of Scan-a-thon. Whoever “they” are, they’re right, by the way: no one works harder than a lazy person to avoid work. As this may be the last major batch of scanning, and the files have all been transferred to my laptop, and organized to boot, that was the most diligent effort I’ve ever made to justify not doing my actual work. But, I can now shred another huge sack of paper.
I was determined to make the most of Saturday: take the truck in for appraisals, get a haircut, get my work started/done, and finish a load of laundry all before a semi-formal dinner event that night. Then I changed my mind: just get all the work done at home (work and laundry) and work on the truck on Sunday. The change of plans did me in. We had an unannounced power outage “for maintenance” starting at 8:30 and scheduled to end in the evening. This meant no laundry, no computer to work on (my laptop can’t sustain life on battery for more than a minute) sooo ….. change of plans again. Running errands earned me $4 for dropping off a big bag of stuff at my friend’s garage sale, I got a very little work done, dropped off a ton of books for a friend. That was about all I could manage before getting ready to go to the dinner.
Dinner was good fun, lots of good food, friends, and a five month old baby needing babysitting. Let me tell ya, I needed that tequila on the rocks after toting him around for nearly an hour. Terribly cute, but he got awfully heavy.
Today? Wasted most of it resting, and am so very overwhelmed by all the things remaining to be done, much like FB was feeling. Just can’t seem to muster the motivation to get started on the thousand things that need to get done. Even though I purged another 30-40 books, there’s still have a long way to emptying the bookshelf, tons of containers under my bed and desk to clear out, the closet is still not pared down enough, I have work to do for the upcoming Monday that’s still not getting done, my tax records need updating and organizing, there’s a friend and movie I’ve rescheduled once already this weekend and would feel flaky doing it again, but there are still job related problems to address and resolve. Escape Brooklyn and the NYTimes are freaking me out with talk of a Depression, news of the continuing economic hardships, woes of public transportion.
It’s not just me, one good friend is going through similar work and family related stresses so I need to support him, another friend is pregnant and requires attention there, another friend is recovering from medical problems and is stressed about her schooling future and career.
And it’s Thankgiving weekend next week. I planned to be done with so much more by now! Or imagined that I’d be much further along. *sigh*
Sorry for the laundry list and venting, I know it’s not helping me get anything done when it seems like I have just over a month to go and more tasks than hours to do them in. And the grocery shopping needs to be done. Gah. Better get cracking. At least I slept off most of the pain in my arms, wrists and hands from stressing them beyond their usual limits while babysitting. Not crippled for a day or two: major plus!
Also a plus: despite all the crazed feeling, at the very least, my financial life is currently holding steady. Might not last too much longer depending on the economy, but for now, it’s ok.
June 18, 2008
After making sure that I’d asked for refills on everything I needed, and asked for a new note for my fibro treatments on Monday, I thought I was set for at least two or three months.
Turns out I forgot one. Dangit! I like the pharmacy that’s attached to my medical building, but it’s a good 20 miles away and I really don’t want to make another drive out there solely to pick up one medication.
Experimentally, I logged onto the Kaiser website to test their pharmacy order option and found that they have a mail delivery option. Huzzah! I don’t like that they won’t show me the price before I order because there’s no mention of shipping charges, but I can cancel the order if I decide that the emailed price is too high for shipping costs. Likely, they just won’t show a price because they have to check for the copay when they fill the RX.
Note: I wrote this last Friday before all the hullaballoo. A week later, I have only been charged my copay, and I have a three month supply of medication without having to spend another $5-7 on gas. This is wonderful!
June 12, 2008
Do yourself a favor and save yourself a really uncomfortable visit to the dentist. I don’t mean skip it entirely! Even though I didn’t have a copay, I was levied a toll of the worst dental pain ever on Monday. As a rule, I like the dentist. Admittedly, this is because I’ve been fairly lucky and have had very few cavities. Also, the dentist pales in comparison to the torture of the orthodontist under whose heel I suffered for years.
So, coming from someone who doesn’t fear the dentist and enjoys dental visits: please, please floss right or you will quickly learn why people rate fear of the dentist second only to public speaking.
Turns out that there is a wrong way to floss: my way.
I’ve been using a Reach flosser because I always complain that my hands are too big to fit inside my mouth. It’s been so long that I’ve given away all my free regular floss from all those Walgreens FAR deals. I might have an old dusty box hiding in a supplies box somewhere, and I’ll have to break it out now.
This is how you floss correctly:
1. Take a long string of floss, wrap it around your fingers.
2. Wrap a section of the floss around your tooth in a C shaped, and scrape it so that you’re hitting the front and back of your tooth. (Ugh, I don’t like the thought of scraping. But it’s better to floss that way than have the dentist doing it later!) Do the same for the other side.
3. Use a new section for every tooth. This prevents you from just moving bacteria from one tooth to the next one.
It’s pretty simple, but I sure wish my dental school friend had told me this earlier!
February 14, 2008
Tylenol Cold and Cough liquid (Cool Burst, tastes disgusting): $6.99
Tylenol Chest Congestion tablets: $5.89, with a 10% discount
Generic for Nyquil: $8.99
Hall’s Cough Drops: $1.99
(2) 1/2 gallon cartons of OJ: $6
Regular Extra-Strength Tylenol: $7
Halls Defense Tablets: free, supplied by friend, boss, anyone who doesn’t want me sharing my germs
= $36.86
I’m so thankful for my FSA … I’d be pretty aggravated if I were paying for these out of pocket entirely because I wasn’t prepared to be sick for upwards of two weeks.
August 3, 2007
I think my mom might have had a stroke last night, and my nightmares about not having medical insurance all straightened out in the event of emergencies has come true. I’m scrambling to track down information on what little health coverage she has, and not having much success. In the meantime, my coworker is helping me flesh out options for emergency care/clinic referrals, etc., and I think that my sole, best option is to have her go to the emergency county hospital near my workplace and pay any associated costs of exams and testing out of pocket.
I’m praying for the clarity of mind and composure to do what needs to be done that I sorely lack right now. Thank goodness for older, more experienced coworkers with a background in the health care industry.