In the past the employee did not have have access to their HRA account. The account was used when eligible expenses were billed to the insurance company and it help offset out of pocket expenses that one may have not planned for.
This year an enhancement was made allowing co-pays to be paid from your HRA account. This appeared to be something Wells changed to give you more flexibility and potentially lower out of pocket expenses for your normal
co-pays.
Not quite, this change is forcing you to drain this account BEFORE you can even touch your Flexible Spending Account(FSA).
If you have co-pays or pr-scrip-ions that you paid for with your FSA in the past, all of this will now be taken from your HRA account. Your FSA account will sit there and very well may expire if you don’t have other expenses like dental or vision.
This was not clear in the announcement. More flexibility to me is not requiring use of my HRA funds until their exhausted before using my FSA funds which I allocate from my pay and expire annually.
What happens if you’ve exhausted those funds with co-pays and pr-scrip-ion costs (which previously were paid for with your FSA) and have have a medical procedure or test that cost $1500?
Before this change, this could’ve been taken from your HRA, providing you had funds, now, you have a much higher chance being put in a financial disaster if you have something occur.
You should be given a choice as to what account the expenses are to be paid from if they are eligible to be paid from both accounts, considering the stipulations surrounding annual expiration.
This change wasn’t for flexibility, this was to drain accounts of every employee with a running balance!
I love the way they twisted this one.