Style4Home - How to Keep Track of Your Medical Expenses

(ARA) - Does someone in your family have a chronic medical condition, or suffer from some other ailment that requires multiple visits to the doctor? If so, you're probably overwhelmed by medical bills.

According to the Trends in Health and Aging Report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the average American family spends $2,267 out of pocket on medical bills each year. The number doubles, or even triples for those dealing with chronic conditions.

With tax day just around the corner, now is a good time to review your bills and see if you've spent enough to take a tax write-off. The I.R.S. allows you to deduct the part of your medical expenses that is more than 7.5 percent of your adjusted gross income.

Say, for example, your adjusted gross income is $40,000, 7.5 percent of which is $3,000. If you spent $2,700 on out of pocket medical expenses, you would be ineligible for a deduction. However, if you spent $5,000 or more due to an extended illness, accident or some other health crisis, you owe it to yourself to take that $2,000 deduction.

In Dan Robinson's case, the expenses amounted to a lot more. His son, Zane, was born with a rare genetic disorder that required multiple surgeries. In his first year of life, the bills soared over $1 million.

While he and his wife were dealing with their medical nightmare, they ignored the dozens of bills that had piled up, including one for $100,000 that should have been sent to the insurance company, but wasn't. Once they started receiving collections notices, Robinson, then a 32-year-old engineering manager at Intuit Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., sat down and wrote a software program that would help him keep track of his bills.

That program eventually evolved into Quicken Medical Expense Manager, a tool that makes tracking your bills and payments easy. Click here to view a product demonstration.

All you have to do is enter such information as the patient name, service date, provider, reason for the visit and the amount billed. Once you receive a statement from your insurance company in the mail, you can log back into the program and enter the amount paid and your responsibility.

The software also offers tools that can help you find and fix billing errors, resolve disputes, keep track of your payments, and remind you of upcoming appointments and prescription renewal dates. Fields are available where notes such as the payment due date and any special arrangements worked out with the provider can be kept. The tool can also help you track expenses across multiple insurance plans, including Medicare, Medicaid and supplemental plans.

Quicken Medical Expense Manager is only available for purchase online. Click here to place an order. For a limited time, there is a $20 discount being offered -- you can purchase Medical Expense Manager for $49.99.

Courtesy of ARAcontent

* Intuit and Quicken are registered trademarks and/or registered service marks of Intuit Inc. in the United States and other countries.