With open enrollment season soundly underway, and the New Year quickly approaching, you might be wondering how the new healthcare law should affect your healthcare choices. Although I briefly reviewed that new healthcare law in a recent post, one element of the law which virtually escaped my eye revolves around the issue of flexible spending accounts. While in the past you may have had a reliable formula—which you derived by scrupulously pouring over your or your family’s healthcare history—to calculate how much to put into FSA each year, calculating how much you should take out this year will be no easy task.
As your HR department may have reported, one provision of the new healthcare law which will take effect this New Year relates directly to what you purchase with money you’ve tucked away into a flexible spending account. Specifically, employees with flexible spending accounts will be barred from using such money on over-the-counter drugs—such as ibuprofen or Sudafed—unless they have a prescription from their doctor for those drugs. Although, reports Fristen Gerencher of MarketWatch, some consumers may not be happy about the change, and as a result may have to reevaluate how they use their flexible spending accounts. It appears that doctors are more enthusiastic about this change than the consumer. Dr. Glen Stream, president-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians, points out that by taking over-the-counter medications patients oftentimes are taking their health into their own hands. In light of this, Dr. Stream supposes this change might provide doctors a “more complete knowledge of what [medications] patients are taking, hopefully it would lead to better health care and avoiding drug interactions.”
For most employees, however, this change requires a new calculus to estimate healthcare and healthcare-related expenses over the year. It is important, therefore, that you keep all of this in mind when forecasting your medical expenses for this next year. Unfortunately, this calculus will again require revision in 2013 once the new cap for FSA contributions take effect.
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