The Other Pain After a Medical Emergency

February 16, 2016

My husband has been battling to keep his diabetes under control for the last few years. But no matter how diligent he may be, he still may find himself in the hospital. As we started talking about a recent hospital visit, he started sharing with me the financial lessons learned over the last few years.

The pain never seems to end. It starts somewhere in the body and usually winds up in the wallet. I don’t mean the body aches or the healing of the short or sometimes long term medical wounds. I am referring to the unforeseen financial pain that comes after the medical emergency, treatments or hospital visits.

It is no surprise that we don’t realize this until it is too late. If you are gainfully employed, you usually have a benefits package with medical insurance, dental insurance, and sometimes that extra coverage of FSA reimbursement option for pharmacy costs. But what about the additional cost that was not covered by the insurance plan like the lab work or the additional cost from the specialist you must see for the additional test that can’t be performed by the primary physician?

Having experienced this firsthand, it usually goes something like this. You get sick and need to go to the emergency room (sometimes by an ambulance). You get treated while in the hospital and then go to your primary physician for a follow-up and then a specialist or two just to be safe. This all happens within a few weeks or so and in between those visits, you stop by the pharmacy since you know that you have to have those prescriptions because your doctor says so.

When you start to look at the cost, you realize that you have just paid, a co-pay, a specialist co-pay, a cost for medicine that was not completely covered by your insurance, the time away from work and gas money for those trips. Those are the visible costs. The invisible costs are the emergency room visit, the lab work, and the additional out-of-network cost that can occur if you happen to get sick while away from your home network while traveling for business or vacation.

So here is where the real issue lies. We fool ourselves into thinking that this will never happen to us or that we rarely get sick. Well, as the saying goes, Murphy always shows up when you least expect him and you will find yourself having to participate in the aforementioned situations.

After experiencing these unforeseen and unplanned events, some lessons have definitely been learned about my family budgeting. I have learned to review how much I spend on visits and medication to gauge how much I need to budget for medical expenses. I have also learned that pre-tax medical savings accounts like flexible spending accounts and health care savings accounts are your best defense against unexpected medical expenses. You can put money into an account that goes in pre-tax and can come out for medical expenses tax free.

Also, add money to your savings for unforeseen events or an overage category. This will keep you from having to take money set aside for other expenses. These simple budget adjustments will be a great start to taking the self-inflicted pain out of your wallet so that you can have financial gains, not financial pains.