Donor eggs and flexible spending account?

[Anonymous]

Does anyone know if you use $$ in your FSAFeds health savings account to pay for donor eggs (and related procedures)?? And, assuming you can, each spouse can put in 5K (total of 10K) to put towards the hefty donor egg cost (we're thinking Shady Grove shared risk/shared donor - which I think runs 25-30K)?

Anyone have sage advise/experience to share?

Thanks so much!

[Anonymous]

If you are going to be spending that much money, you might do better to take the medical tax deduction. I would check with a tax person to see what your best option is.

[Anonymous]

First, you can only put in 5000 total into an FSA. It can come from one or both spouses, but only 5000 total. Yes, the 5000 can be used for donor egg charges. I don't know how much you make, but even after the FSA you are still spending 24000 out of pocket, which is usually enough for a medical deduction. The expenses have to reach 7.5% of your adjusted gross income, which means that unless your agi is over 320,000 you will be able to deduct something.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:First, you can only put in 5000 total into an FSA. It can come from one or both spouses, but only 5000 total. Yes, the 5000 can be used for donor egg charges.

This is not true. At my company, you are allowed to put up to $7000 in your FSA. Here is the IRS publication. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p969.pdf The information is on page 16.

[Anonymous]

Right now, IRS has no legal limit to what you can contribute to medical FSAs. However, employers usually set the amount you can contribute since there are some administrative costs/risk involved to them. The amount is set for the employee but I believe that feds have special rule for married federal workers - that each can take the upper limit cap. So OP if you are saying that feds have $5,000 cap and both you and your spouse are employed through feds then you can contribute a total of $10,000. If you spouse not federal worker then he/she can contribute whatever their employer offers/sets.

Note that starting in 2013 this will change. Annual FSA contributions will be capped at $2,500 per year.

They do pay for donor eggs and most fertility expenditures. This website provides a good list of what is an allowable expenses. https://www.fsafeds.com/fsafeds/eligibleexpenses.asp

[Anonymous]

It may be too late since the FSA Feds allocation period ended Monday, Dec. 13th.

But for anyone else who is reading- I think they are extremely tricky with that program, and to be quite frank, I wondered if the person sending me correspondence wasn't just "opposed" to the idea of freezing embryos or doing IVF, from some religious perspective or something. I read all the stated rules and guidelines, and my situation seemed to be a gray area, and reasonable to grant me reimbursement for the request I put in.. I have a situation where we have frozen embryos, and have to pay a fixed fee once per year, for any amount of storage- that could be one day, up to 365 days. They were extremely cagey and unreasonable.

[Anonymous]

I don't know about donor eggs, but I used FSA money to pay for donor sperm. I can't imagine why sperm would be eligible but not eggs. I also used FSA money to pay for IVF. I'm a Fed employee and was able to contribute $5000 to my FSA.