Let Santa Contribute To Your Health Savings Account (HSA)

Last week, while on a business trip, I put $3.33 into my HSA with the click of a mouse.  Whilst sitting in my hotel room, trying to be productive one evening I went to My HSA Rewards and through their website created a printed Christmas card of my kids through VistaPrint.  I had 100 cards printed which included 100 envelopes.  As a bonus they threw in a notepad with my kids picture on it for free as part of some promotion they had going on that day.  Sometime in the next couple of weeks, my cards will show up, we’ll address them and send ‘em on out.  The price was something like $33 for the cards including shipping, so I thought all in all, it was a great deal.

So what does this have to do with Santa and my HSA you are saying?  Well, in return for purchasing the Christmas cards through My HSA Rewards, I earned 11% toward my Health Savings Account for doing so.  So in addition to getting a great deal on printing, I also am putting away about $3.33 into my Health Savings Acount in the process.

But that is just the start of it.  In addition to printing, My HSA Rewards has way over 300 merchants in their program.  So, for example, I was looking at the HP Home Store for a computer for one of my kids for Christmas.  I found one I like, so when I pull the trigger on that, I’ll get 3% back on that purchase toward my HSA.

My wife wants a new comforter for the bed to replace the 1988 dust collector that’s sitting there now, so I am looking at Overstock.com.  If I purchase from Overstock through the My HSA Rewards website, I’ll get 4% back on that.  I already bought two de-humidifiers from them after the 500 year floods we had in Atlanta earlier this fall.

The point of all this, is that for every dollar I spend on family Christmas shopping through My HSA Rewards, I will get some portion of that back in the form of a contribution to my Health Savings Account.  I joined the program for free this past summer and I have already earned over $90 in contributions to my Health Savings Account.  That’s found money.   It’s like Santa putting money into my HSA.

Health Episodes In The Flying Petri Dish

I spent the better part of this week on a business trip in New Jersey and the worser part of it fighting off some sort of plague that decided to infest my body.  Basically, I picked up  some sort of crud that started as a tickly cough and ended up with me barking up phlegm bombs, my eyes crusting up like a loaf of bread, the inside of my mouth looking and feeling like I had swallowed boiling water, and my body generally feeling like an alien had invaded it.  I bought a ton of OTC goodies from a CVS Pharmacy which, of course, I could have paid for from my Health Savings Account which HSA rules allow for.

Having been sick all week, I was uber sensitive about the well being of my fellow passengers and was also wondering how many other plague carrying, pflegm barking compatriots there were on that plane with me.  Normally squalor doesn’t particularly bother me, but damned if I was going to spread what I had to 150 total strangers.  Prior to boarding the plane I washed my hands.  When I got on the plane I pulled out my handy “Wet Ones” and wiped my hands again, my tray table and the arm rests of my chair.  Even Michael Jackson would have been proud of me.  Midway through the flight, I went to the lav and washed my hands again while singing my ABCs and Twinkle Twinkle.  I was on the aisle of a three seat row and when I had to cough, I made sure to do it into my shirt sleeve.  Short of donning a containment suit, I think I did a pretty good job of not polluting the cabin.

The problem was, the guy sitting next to me, apparently was carrying a similar plague.  And sandwiched between me and another guy, he proceeded to cough liberally into his hands, all over the back of the tray table, on my shirt sleeve, on the other guy’s shirt sleeve, pretty much everywhere.  It was April showers in November, at 30,000 feet.  

If April showers bring Mayflowers and Mayflowers bring Pilgrims, then all the Pilgrims are going to have the plague and Thanksgiving is going to suck.  Got it?

The moral of the story is, for the sake of your fellow mankind, when you are on an airplane or any confined space for that matter, have some consideration man!  Wash your hands, cough on your sleeve.  It’s a flying petri dish for goodness sake, and we would all like to live to see another Thanksgiving.

God bless you.  Now go find a hanky

Yes, Dental Implants Are Qualified HSA Medical Expenses.

I wrote some time back about a trip to my dentist that resulted in me losing a molar.  It was also the first time in my life I felt empathy for all people who would rather jump out off a plane (with a parachute of course) than go see a Dentist.  Until that day, I had never endured much more than a routine filling and prided myself in the strength of my teeth and what a fabulous person was for having taken such good care of my pearly whites.  Pride is a dangerous thing….

So finally after having walked around with a hole in my mouth for the past year, I’m going in, in a couple of weeks to see what the actual cost of the implant will be.  In the world of consumer driven health I am certainly going to see if the price is negotiable and will report back on that in a future blog.  I’m expecting the rack rate to be in the $4K-$5K range.  My wife has already told me “Merry Christmas,” and I told here I’d just as soon had the $49 cordless screw driver that I got last year.

All kidding aside.  If I do brace myself and have the procedure done, it is a qualified medical expense and I can take it from my HSA.

The Biggest Health Savings Account (HSA) Rules

Of course this is subject to opinion but at this time of the year, there are two specific HSA rules I like to focus on and remind people about.

The first is the establishment of one’s HSA account.  If you are one of those folks like me who got their HSA qualified High Deductible Health Plan early in the year, you might have been, ahem, a little bit slow to establish and the actual bank account (the HSA) that enables you to put $ aside for your present and future health care expenses.  You have until the end of the year (there are 31 days in December for those of us who are calendar impaired) to set up your account.

If you have not set up your HSA, there are two very good reasons why you should do it.  First off, you can not reimburse yourself from your HSA for any medical expenses you had prior to the date of the HSA being set up.  And secondly, you won’t be able to take any tax deductions for money you’d like to put into it for 2009.

The second rule ties to the first one.  So long as you get that account set up this year, you have until 4/15/2010 to make contributions for 2009.  This is key because even if you haven’t put a nickel in the account this year, you can still fund the account through 4/15/10 and take the full tax deduction for the deposit against your 2009 taxes.  If you do not take advantage of the tax benefits of your HSA you are “leaving free money on the table.”  And that’s, well, kind of stupid.

Now if you don’t have any $ to put into your HSA right now or would like to contribute more, one way to do so is through a program called My HSA Rewards.  It is a new stealth way to put $ into your HSA.  Basically it is a shopping program.  You shop through the merchants that participate in the program and get a % back from your purchases which can be deposited into your Health Savings Account.  Simple.

Call Me Bubba But The Problem With Health Care Is…

I saw a picture of some congressman sitting in front of a stack of paper last week that was the latest House crack at a piece of legislation that is supposed to represent health care reform.  I think I saw that is was something like 1,950 pages long.    I’m pretty sure any document that is that long is good for attorneys, but beyond that I have to say I am skeptical.

I think it is sadly humorous that there are those in government who think the whole healthcare system is too complicated for the average Joe to sort out.  Hell, how did it get so complicated to begin with?  Is anyone asking that question?  There is no doubt it has become brain numbingly complicated.  But those sitting on the left end of the congressional bench intend to make it “better” by making it even more complicated.

One of the biggest problems with health care as I see it, is that our government will not let the people create the market for it.  Or in other words, there  is such heavy regulation of the industry today, it does not work well in a country that functions best when free markets are allowed to work.  In a market economy, real competition would exist, and you and I would be able to drive costs down and quality of care up with our feet and our wallets.  And guess what; it’s fixin’  to get more complicated, and sadly, unless you are getting it at someone else’s expense, it is also going to get more expensive.

So, if you eat right, exercise, and take really good care of yourself, good for you.  Your reward for being accountable for your own health will be that you get to pay for some other fat slob’s lousy lifestyle.  All wrapped up in a nearly two thousand page document called “health care reform.”

The same men and women who  brought us Social Security and then robbed it blind; who brought us Medicare and are vacuuming our wallets trying to pay for it, are now going to get into the health insurance business in a big way.  If history is any indicator of how this hog is going to fly, the average Aamerican can can count on higher taxes, lower quality of care, less competition and less transparency.  Unless we stand up and raise cain, we are in for a true BOHICA moment.

What ever happened to the KISS principle?  I heard a story once that when NASA was trying to figure out how to put men in space  they spent millions of dollars developing an anti-gravity pen that would write in space.  I even remember when I was a kid, they used to hawk those things on the TV (along with Tang and those nasty peanut butter space sticks).  The Soviets solved the anti-gravity writing problem by sending their cosmonauts into space with a few pencils and pencil sharpeners.  

This whole thing has become a political hairball.  We are not going to see real true reform until our anointed and elected ones cough the damn thing up!

Waffle House, Walmart, and Health Insurance

Let me start by saying, as a consumer, Waffle House and Walmart are two of my favorite places on earth as both represent tremendous value.  They also represent hard work working Americans and are very much part of the fabric that makes this country a wonderful place to live. 

Last night my son and I were playing bachelors, and me, having recently dropped a pint of blood off at my local Red Cross Blood center had a “free” waffle coupon sitting in my wallet as a small thank you from the folks at Red Cross. Heck, I’d have done it for the juice and cookies, but if they want to motivate me to the Waffle House, well that’s ok too.

Anyway, we were the only folks in there on a Sunday evening and we got to talking with our waitress.  Turns out she works two jobs, one at Walmart and the other at Waffle House.  In response to her taking a jab at the employer under whose roof she was not at that moment standing, I made the comment, “well at least they offer health insurance,” she rolled her eyes and said, “that’s no good, it’s only “catastrophic” insurance.  When I asked her what the deductible was she said $2,000.  Now, I don’t know if that was totally accurate or not, but I made the comment, knowing Walmart is almost completely, if not totally utilizing High Deductible Health Plans with HSAs, that, in the unlikely event she were to ever to be in a situation where she had over $2,000 in expenses, even if she didn’t have the money right then, a $2,000 debt was something  from which  most people including her could recover.  

She then proceeded to tell me that she got her health insurance through the Waffle House and that she had a monthly premium of $145 ($1,740 per year), a  $50 annual deductible and then her insurance picked up 80% of the ticket and she was responsible for 20%.  Again I don’t know if her numbers were exactly right, because after all, how many people on group health insurance plans actually know the details of them?  Frankly, it really doesn’t matter.

I then suggested to here that in the even she ever got really sick and here hospital bills were say $10,000, then she would still be stuck with $2,000 out of pocket (maybe more, depending what, if any, her out of pocket maximum was) plus her $1,740 in annual premiums and had she been in the Walmart plan, she might actually be better off.  I also mentioned that if she took her premium savings from the HSA type plan and put them into an HSA, if she ever got sick, she might already have a big chunk of the $2,000 deductible saved for in her HSA.  She said there was no way she had any extra money to put into and HSA.  I mentioned that she had $145 per month she was already putting into her premiums through her other plan.

In the end, I simply suggested, given the fact that she was in the fortunate situation of having multiple options, that she might want to take a look at the math.

The point here is not me trying to sell her on a plan that I pretty much knew nothing about or trash her current plan which I also knew nothing about, but rather about the nature of insurance, the complexity of it for most of us, and how many people look at it.  I think the case of my Waffle House friend is fairly typical of many Americans.  They look at their health insurance merely as a way to finance their health care as opposed to using insurance as it was designed, to manage risk. In my opinion, that’s totally backwards. Secondly, between the insurance companies and the Government, they make it so flippin’ complicated, it is no wonder people can’t figure it out.

There are many people in Congress who think we are too dumb to manage our own healthcare, when the reality of it is, they have created an environment where it is so complicated, so regulated, so non-competitive, and so lacking in transparency people end up making uninformed decisions, or worse, no decisions.

If you are looking at your health insurance options, my advice to you is the same as it was to my friend.  Do the math.  You really have to look at everything, the deductibles, the co-pays, well care, premium payments, tax benefits, your own medical payment history, drug benefits and so forth.  No, it’s not simple, but it’s amazing what you will learn by doing the math.

Are HSA Rules Changing?? Call Your Congress(wo)man

Well if you have a high deductible health plan and you are reading this post, you are not alone in the head scratching department.  And if you are like me you here all these little sound bites; like the possibility of HSAs being made illegal, or restrictions being placed on contributions, or diminimized tax treatment of HSAs, or who knows what else, may be making you a bit nutty too.   Shoot, make up your own stress inducing limitation on HSAs and there’s a chance somebody somewhere in Congress who does not believe you can or should have the right to manage your own health care has given it some thought. 

I’m not going to speculate here about how HDHPs and HSAs are going to be impacted by the congressional hairball being coughed up in Washington at this very moment, but rather to urge you to stand up for yourself and your family’s right not to have several $ trillion spent on your behalf in the name of what the United States Government believes is good for your health.

I wrote the headline for this article this morning with the intent to come back to it this afternoon and draft the post.  As luck would happen, in between, I took a bike ride around my basement and heard Mike Gallagher mention a way through which those who want to protect their rights regarding health care can contact their congressmen and congresswomen.  As the headline suggests, I would advocate a call to your elected representatives in Washington, but if you are really in a hurry, you can go through “Free Our Health Care Now” and send email letters to your Senators and Representatives in about 2 minutes by clicking on the link above.  What I loved about it was that it pulled my Senators’ and Representative’s email addresses for me so I didn’t have to look them up.  And as a bonus for the exceptionally lazy (that would be me) it even drafted a letter to my congressmen that I could then either accept or edit any way I wanted.  Total flippin’ no brainer.

Hey, it doesn’t matter if you call or write.  What matters is that you call or write.  Use your voice today!

38 Ways to Travel, And Save Into My Health Savings Account (HSA)

When I was booking a trip to New Jersey this morning, I realized since the beginning of August I have earned  over $30 toward my Health Savings Account through a program called My HSA Rewards, just booking my travel.  If you follow this blog, you know that I am an advocate of that program which helps me  put more money into my Health Savings Account by shopping for the normal things I purchase every day.  

Basically I log in to the My HSA Rewards website, go to the shopping tab, and in the case of my New Jersey trip, click on the link to Priceline and book my trip.  The folks at My HSA Rewards give me 2%  for Priceline purchases which goes into my My HSA Rewards account.  After I  earn $50 into my account I can then transfer it into my Health Savings Account.

But here’s why I am babbling on about this.  Just in the past few weeks, My HSA Rewards has  added a lot of new ways to earn more HSA deposits.  And today as I was booking my travel, I counted up the ways to earn in just the travel category, and it added up to 38 different ways.  They are affiliated with a lot of the online travel sites including Priceline, Expedia, Orbitz and others; airlines like Delta, United and Virgin; Hotels , rental cars and luggage, you name it.  So now there are even more ways for me to earn when I book my travel.  And that’s on top of the hundreds of other ways to shop and earn.  The amount of the awards vary by merchant with some %’s back even in the double digits 

Excluding whatever I earned today from my Priceline purchase and another purchase I made from Overstock.com, to date I have managed to earn over $70 which ultimately will land in my health savings account.   I like that.  That’s $70 that won’t pinch my pocket when I need to use it for my family’s health care.

Don’t Rush Out To Spend Your Health Savings Account (HSA) Bucks

It’s getting near the end of the year and you, especially if you are fairly new to HSAs, may be thinking you need to rush out and spend whatever you have saved in your Health Savings Account or risk losing it at the end of the year.  You may be thinking about buying a new pair of glasses, some saline solution or a big bag of Rolaids to deal with stomach ache you are going to get when your employer tells you how much your insurance rates are going to rise this year.  Or maybe you are about to change jobs and think you need to spend all your HSA bucks before punching out of your current job.

 DON’T DO IT!  You are not going to lose the money in your HSA.  Any contribution made into it by you, your employer from your My HSA Rewards, account or from your Fairy Godmother is yours.  There is no need to go out and blow it for any of the reasons stated above or for any reason.  It’s in the law that the money retained in a health savings account is yours and even if you do not have a qualifying high deductible health plan anymore, the money sitting in the account is yours…forever.   And here’s another little bonus some folk forget, and that is to save your receipts for all of your qualified medical expenses.  That way, if you can afford not to dip into it now but let it sit and grow tax free, you can go back and pay yourself back years down the road using the old receipts as substantiation.  It makes smart tax sense.

Anyway, don’t get yourself worked up into a bunch over those $s in your HSA.  They can sit there forever if you like saving for a rainy day, so there is no need to have that extra stress in your life here at the end of the year about how you are going to blow your HSA dollars to keep from losing them.

Somebody Talk To Me About Blanche Lincoln

I am not a political hound, wonk, addict, freak, junkie, or otherwise over the top aficionado of the American political system.  So no surprise I had not heard of Senator Blanche Lincoln from the great Southern State of Arkansas until I saw the NY Times article today that outlined her role in seven days of debate in the Senate Finance Committee regarding health care reform.

She appears to have a fairly conservative approach toward health care and is certainly far away from some of here Democrat pals pushing for a public option.  So somebody who knows Mrs. Lincoln, talk to me and the rest of my non-political hound, wonk addict, freak, junkie, or otherwise non-over the top political aficionados  about the likes of Mrs. Lincoln and her centrist pals and their potential role in the re-shaping of health care in America.

As a fiscal conservative, I’ll bet Mrs. Lincoln would like programs like My HSA Rewards.