Healthcare Expenses

Here’s a scene from my ledger that happens a few times a year. Over the course of a month, we buy a scattered pile of medical things out of pocket — a doctor’s visit copay, a box of prescribed supplies from the pharmacy, some physical-therapy sessions, a couple of online orders for a brace and a monitor. Nothing gets billed to insurance automatically, because these are the kinds of items you have to submit yourself. So I collect the receipts, fill out the insurer’s claim form, and mail off a bundle totaling something like 260 USD. Weeks later, an Explanation of Benefits shows up. The insurer has approved 138.01 USD — not the full 260 USD — and a check for that amount is on the way. And now I have two small, annoying problems. The first is reconciliation at the item level. The EOB doesn’t say “we reimbursed the brace and the copay but not the pharmacy order.” It shows adjusted, bundled, partially-approved line amounts that don’t map cleanly onto the charges as they hit my credit card. Figuring out which of the eight things I bought actually got covered — and which got denied — is genuinely tedious, and most of the time I don’t actually need the answer. The second problem is worse. That pharmacy charge from six weeks ago? It got imported and auto-categorized as groceries, because the store that filled the prescription also sells groceries and my importer keyed off the merchant name. By the time the check arrives, the original purchase has scattered into three or four categories, half of them wrong, and hunting it down is its own small archaeology project. This post is about how I book the reimbursement anyway — cleanly, in a couple of minutes — without solving either of those problems. ...

Accounting for health-related expenses in the U.S. is slightly different from typical expense tracking because it usually involves insurance. In this post, we’ll walk through how to use Beancount to track your healthcare expenses in the U.S. How Healthcare System Work in US How healthcare system works In its simplest form, the healthcare system typically works as follows: You visit a healthcare provider who delivers medical services to you. The provider submits claims to your insurance company. The insurance company verifies the claims and pays a portion (or all, depending on your coverage). Once the claims are processed, the healthcare provider sends you a bill for the remaining amount. The insurance company also sends you an Explanation of Benefits (EOB), detailing how your medical claims were processed based on your plan. As a patient, there are two important documents you should pay attention to: ...