: Flexible Spending Accounts
A lengthy diatribe coming up here. I have a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) through my regular day job. I won’t bore you with the details (you can look ’em up on wikipedia or where ever you feel like) but basically an FSA is a US tax program that allows you to save money by not having to pay taxes on some medical expenses. This has nothing to do with Obamacare or Medicaid — it goes way back to the 70s (that’s the 1970s).
Here’s how it works.
1) You go to a doctor, you get a bill (whatever your insurance does not cover)
2) You pay your bill
3) You save your receipt.
4) You fill out a form, make a copy of your receipt, put the form and receipt in an envelope, seal the envelope, put a stamp on it, and put the mailing & return addresses on the envelope.
5) On Saturday morning, you get in your car and drive to the post office spewing CO2 into the atmosphere (I minimize the spewing with my nice environmentally and politically correct Prius) and put your letter in the mail chute.
6) In the post office, a nice person collects your letter and puts it inside some machine which reads the address and figures out where it has to go. For me it has to go to somewhere in Pennsylvania.
7) Your letter goes into a truck and, if you’re lucky, that truck goes to some central sorting area where it gets shoved around and then goes into another truck and goes out to Pennsylvania.
8) Once it gets to Pennsylvania, another nice person (or maybe a machine) takes your letter and puts it in a shipping box.
9) Eventually another truck takes your letter to the insurance company.
10) At the insurance company, another nice person opens up your letter, looks at the receipt, makes sure that it is a legitimate medical bill (so you’re not trying to rip off the government), and enters the amount of money you spent into a computer. Likely the NSA gets a copy. Hopefully they re-cycle your letter and contents.
11) The computer writes out a check for the proper amount and a machine puts it in another stamped envelope and it goes into a shipping box.
12) The box which has your check gets loaded onto a truck, and the truck drives to the local post office.
13) There a machine sorts your envelope and if you’re lucky, another truck drops off your envelope at your local post office.
14) At your local post office another nice person puts your envelope into a bag.
15) Another nice person then takes that bag with your envelope, gets into a truck, drives around your neighborhood until he (or she) gets to your house, where he (or she) puts the envelope into your mailbox.
16) You get home from work, take the mail inside, open up the envelope, take out the check, and put the empty envelope into your re-cycling bin.
17) You fill out a deposit slip and sign the back of the check
17) On Saturday morning, you get into your car, drive to the bank spewing CO2 into the atmosphere, park your car, get out of your car, go into the bank, wait on line until you get to the teller.
18) The teller verifies that you filled out your deposit slip correctly, enters the amount of the check into the bank computer, and tells you to have a nice day.
19) Get a Starbucks on the way back from the bank.
20) Collapse from mental exhaustion
I may have overlooked a step or two here – but I think I’ve captured the essential details. If you are truly masochistic or desperate you do this every time you get a doctor bill; if you’re like me, you wait until the end of the year and do it in one fell swoop. (BTW I love felling swoops, they make a great sound – although I’ve never figured out if that sound comes from the “felling” or the “swooping”. But I digress.)
Anyway, the net result of all this is that I save somewhere between $400 and $500 a year on my income taxes. However, as bizarre as this whole Rube Goldberg process seems, I have not yet mentioned the most bizarre aspect of this program. You have to decide at the beginning of each year exactly how sick you and your family are going to be and how much money you will spend – and if you guess wrong and you are healthier than you guessed? You lose your money! Yes, you heard correctly. If you think you and your family are gonna rack up $2000 in medical bills over the year, and you only spend $1500? You’re out $500.
As you may have surmised by all of this, I am hitting this very situation, so I gotta “use it or lose it”. In a way, this is actually a good thing. Next week I am getting that colonoscopy I’ve been putting off…
2021 META-COMMENT: Notice that I had two #17s. Shame on me. How could I have let that happen? :->
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Dec 14, Saturday, 8:00PM-9:30PM – Jump, Shuffle, and Moan at Hat City, 459 Valley Street, City of Orange, NJ 07050 (862) 252-9147
That’s tonight. My buddy Rob Signorile fronts this tight blues ensemble. Hat City is clean, it has a good sound system, and it has excellent New Orleans style food. They’re predicting snow today so call ahead and make sure we’re on.
http://www.hatcitykitchen.com
Dec 20, Friday, 10:00PM-1:00AM – Better Off Dead at The Great Notch Inn, Route 46, Little Falls (973) 256-7742
This is the annual Better Off Dead Christmas extravaganza. I never knew there were so many Christmas themed rock & roll songs until I started playing with VD King & Better Off Dead. The evening’s highlight? All I Got For Christmas Was Drunk….
http://www.betteroffdead.com/home.htm/
http://www.agreatertown.com/little_falls_nj/great_notch_inn_new_jerseys_rockin_roadhouse_00089580
Dec 23 & Dec 30, Monday, 8:00PM-11:00PM – Big Ed Sullivan Blues Jam at The Red Lion, 151 Bleeker St., Greenwich Village, NYC (212) 260-9797
I rarely get to go to Big Ed’s “World Famous” blues jam cuz it’s on a work night, but I’m taking a little “stay-cation” the last week of December so I will be making an appearance two Mondays in a row. For those of you who are not familiar with the scene, at a blues jam different musicians get on & off during the course of the evening. There will likely be other keyboard players there, so if you show up and you don’t see me on stage, it’s likely that I’m taking turns with the other keyboard players. Also, every once in a while, the hours change from 8-11 to 9-12, so I suggest calling ahead just to make sure. The Red Lion has an enormous selection of bottled beer and decent bar food.
http://www.redlionnyc.comhttps://www.facebook.com/pages/Big-Ed-Sullivan/253831450378