Straight from an HR manager
John at Romantic Ramblings is an HR manager in real life, and has put up a post with some information on how Flexible Spending Accounts can work to an employer’s benefit. The main criteria: whether or not your out-of-pocket medical expenses are predictable.
Technorati Tags: Flexible Spending Accounts
April 20th, 2007 at 9:41 am
What a summary! Right on; and you said it in about 2% of the words I needed to say the same thing!
John
April 21st, 2007 at 4:47 am
I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds naughty.
April 23rd, 2007 at 10:30 am
I have been doing the flex spending for four years, and haven’t had any problem with it. I do a conservative estimate and haven’t had to forfeit any $$ at the end of the year. I do my fitness membership for the YMCA, which is $700 per year. I wish I had had the flex spending back when I used to have to pay for childcare.
I do get your point though, Kirsen, about this not being a solution for the problem of accessible and affordable health care in this country. It’s still my money I’m spending on the higher co-pays for precriptions and all the things that are not covered by my insurance (my son’s glasses, for example). It’s also interesting that the employer gets the unspent money! I didn’t realize that!
If I did end up with unspent money at the end of the year, I would buy Jeff a spare pair of glasses. One year he lost his glasses but we had already spent our flex money, so I told him he had to wait until after January 1st to get a new pair! (He does have contacts though so I wasn’t totally making my kids go around blind!)
April 24th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Hi, Deb,
I ended up opting in to our program with a very conservative contribution.
As far as healthcare costs, I hope someday to get my head around that. My hunch is that at bottom it’s got something to do with how we value health/life and also use money as a proxy for value; somehow combined with modern technology & drugs we’ve turned out a mischevious brew. Certainly the providers are getting squeezed; hospitals are struggling to just break even, a lot of them, and I don’t begrudge the high salaries MDs get — I think I should be paying them more than I pay the gal who waits on my table at Applebee’s.
By the same token, insurance shields us from the sticker shock that might really wake people up. I got a bill by mistake from ViaHealth, which runs clinical blood testing services here in Roch — they billed me instead of my insurance company. I was astonished at how high the bill was — for those few minutes before I realized the bill was a mistake, it hit home how damned expensive their services are. Does that mean their services aren’t worth it? In some cases, the answer is probably “yes” — meaning, if I were always responsible for the entire amount, I might be a bit more selective; I might push my doctor to see whether all the tests were really necessary etc. Is there a cheaper way.
OTOH the human body is mind-bogglingly complex, and it’s like we’re only just beginning to understand how to understand it, at a biomolecular level. So all our medicine today is in effect “early adaptor” medicine, and so has a really high price tag.
Ugh, I’m rambling, have to stop!
April 25th, 2007 at 10:10 am
I don’t understand what you mean by early adaptor, so I’m asking you to “ramble” some more on that!
April 25th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
It’s a bit of biz jargon, Deb. Although I misspelled it, should be adopter.
Someone who needs to be the first to have a new gadget is an early adopter. They spend a premium and suffer any bugs that haven’t been worked out yet.
April 26th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Learn something new every day.
April 26th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
:-)