Chiropractic Reimbursements Received

$872 received in chiropractic reimbursements from my health care company over the past 10 days.

Even though my company's recent 50% health benefit cut has meant I am paying (IMO) exorbitant health care costs, I am enjoying some juicy benefits of this PPO. I found out in May or so that my visits to my chiropractor were partially covered.

Because he is out-of-network, I could receive 80% of each visit after an annual $250 deductible had been met. His visits were only $40 but I was going about twice a month for a couple of years. Also, I could submit for reimbursement up to two years after the visit. And LaLa is covered under my plan as of October 2004, so this means that we could submit for all of my 2004 and 2005 visits and all of LaLa's visits since her coverage date.

This was quite the paperwork ordeal and there was a doozy of a copy & paste error (all of my 10/04 to 6/05 visits were entered under LaLa's subscriber ID...flagging each one as a duplicate and denying reimbursement) with the first go around, but yesterday I received the final balance. I was going to rant and rave about the error prone claim system but at this point I'm just happy I have my cash.

Our total chiropractic expense for 2004 and 2005 (to date) was $2680 (dang that looks huge) and we got about a third of that back.

We decided to forgo chiropractic care this summer to help our savings but now that we have a new chiropractor we've decided to only go once a month. Each month we'll have to front the $80, but at least for the rest of 2005, we should get 80% back the following month. So we'll only be paying $16/mo net for sweet relief for the remainder of 2005.