OK, so we’re still slogging through taxes. We figured out today – thanks to our family accountant – what we have to clear on total medical expenses for the year in order to be able to start deducting them from our taxes. I never thought we’d ever be eligible for that deduction given how high that threshold often is; I figured it was a long-shot at best. We put $5,000 in our flexible spending account last year (EVERY family with an autistic child should have one of those), drained it in four months, and then paid out of pocket for the rest. But I still didn’t realize just how much we’d spent.
FYI – If your total medical expenses for 2008 exceed 7.5% of your adjusted gross income (any money you paid into a flexible spending account doesn’t count since you already don’t pay tax on it), you can start deducting your expenses above that amount. What qualifies as a deductible medical expense? The things you’d expect (doctor visit co-pays, etc.), but there’s also lots of stuff you’d never imagine, like over-the-counter drugs and contact lens solution. Read Publication 502 from the IRS. Learn it, love it. You may also want to download this expense guide from one of the larger flexible spending account administrators in the U.S. It’s helpful too as it goes into more detail than the IRS document.
Anyway, we’re still not done tallying all this up, but all of our eligible medical expenses plus our insurance premiums (which by the way aren’t deductible if they come out of your paycheck pre-tax), so far come to a frightening number.
Over $14,000.
And you know, as far as parents with autistic children go, I’ve heard of people spending way more than that a year. We have decent enough insurance compared to some other people we know, too. It could be much worse. This does include medical expenses for Mary and I, but we can only forgo so much medical care to accommodate what we have to pay for him. We still do have to go ourselves sometimes.
I think we got that 7.5% threshold covered. Sigh.
And if you don’t think health insurance and health care reform is critical to the future of the United States, come over here and let me smack you in the head.
But you know, we’d do it all over again and again for him because that’s what we have to do. He’s worth every bit of it and infinitely more. But the thing is, we shouldn’t have to run up our credit cards or take money out of our homes to pay for all this. None of us should. Our children deserve better, and it’s time we find better ways to give it to them.
Posts that hopefully are similar:
- Flexible Spending Accounts – How to Make Autism Expenses Hurt Less
- The deductible record will stand another year
- Fun with Flexible Spending
- Could Taxes Possibly Be Any More Complicated?
- The Cost to Raise a Child and Yet More Autism Disparity
- In which I say, “Have you ever had a child?”
- Sensory Processing Disorder and the DSM-V – Call to Action
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Its just amazing how much they charge for speech therapy. Seriously, a half hour of therapy costs more than a doctor visit…$186 per half hour here. I dont know what you pay, but here in northern Minnesota its really economically depressed (i.e. more so than everywhere else, pretty much). Because good jobs are scarce here and I didnt make enough money, I pretty much had to quit working and get on public health assistance or else we couldnt afford it…plain and simple. Now I just do some work from home to try to make ends almost meet. No matter what, when you are a “good” autistic parent, you will be poor. No one will help you pay for it, and there is no one else to take your child to therapy (as in resources for people like me who dont have any physically able family members)…so you will put your financial wellness to bed for a long time for your childs sake.
Its absolutely unforgiveable that most insurance is so bad for most people that they have to pay for their therapies out of pocket. Plus the biomedical that no one will cover, its just heartless. I totally agree with you. We all do what we have to do to get our children what they need, but when I hear parents whine about paying for school clothes and diapers…I guess I want to smack them a little bit.
I know of a number of people who’ve had to go into public assistance for insurance. It is possible – at least here and maybe in the rest of the U.S. – to get just your kids on state insurance plans for children, which have quite a bit higher income limits than Medicaid. Getting children covered should get somewhat easier once some of the new healthcare laws take effect, at least I hope so.
The therapy practice we went to before we got into county school services I think billed about $150 per 50 minute session. When our insurance ran out, they actually cut us a deal. Sometimes you can negotiate a separate cash price or pay for sessions in bulk or whatever. We did that with them. It still obviously wasn’t cheap, but it saved us a lot of money. County school services are included in the IEP and all that, and he gets a lot of work in the Pre-K classroom he’s in (a separate classroom for autistic kids – 8 students, 3 teachers). From there, we do a lot of it ourselves at the house. Because we’ve chosen to do the work ourselves outside the school hours, our expenses have been a lot less this year. We do have some luxury to do this, though, because his school, teachers, and therapists are so great and because his various needs fall within a range we feel like we can manage OK ourselves without much additional outside help. I know for some people, this simply isn’t possible.
I agree that the entire health insurance process is a mess, and most definitely a corrupt one. I’m holding on to faith that new rules and mandates for autism coverage that are slowly being enacted state-by-state will help. Biomedical therapies are a mess unto themselves. All the fly-by-night snake oil salespeople along with people who I think mean well but have convinced themselves that their truly bizarre idea is a real therapy have ruined it for the therapies that either are legitimate or are at least safe and potentially helpful enough to try. Insurance is never going to cover all the options, nor should they. People are already abusing the market with junk treatments or outright dangerous ones, and that would just make it worse. Along with this breakneck pursuit of making quick dollars by preying on people’s fears, there’s no way to quickly test the validity of therapies that seem to be showing up in the market daily, and the whole thing is completely unregulated. All this just makes it easy for insurers to dismiss the whole thing, baby and bath water. So until there are hard and fast studies documenting and proving a particular therapy’s validity, don’t expect the insurance climate to change much. Still hoping that Sensory Processing Disorder makes it into the official list of diagnoses. That would be huge leap forward for changes to insurance.
Yeah, the complaints of many other parents of non-special needs kids just drill into me sometimes. I’m trying to rein in my negativity some, but many days I just want to go off and tell them why I think they need to get some perspective. (To put it nicely…)