Best way to pay for marriage counseling - through insurance or as a tax deduction?

[Anonymous]

When we were discussing insurance coverage with our marriage counselor, he brought up the idea that it might be more advantageous to characterize the counseling as some sort of coaching and deduct it, rather than put through insurance for reimbursement. I am not at all familiar with this approach and wondering what the pros/cons are? We are currently double-insured, but plan to go to one insurance plan starting in January. And, now that I am thinking about it, I am not even sure how counseling would be put through insurance (we are new to this). Who is considered the primary for a session - husband or wife? Do you put it through both individual's primary plan and then through each secondary plan? Any insight would be much appreciated. We are hemorrhaging money at this point so would like to have some sort of plan to either pursue reimbursement or know that we will account for with a tax deduction at the end of the year. If helpful to provide the names of our insurance companies and plans, I would be happy to do so. Obviously, we are also contacting a tax accountant for guidance but haven't had much luck yet.

[Anonymous]

First of all I highly doubt you could deduct it-- marriage counseling isn't a medical expense. Second, even if you could deduct it, there is a floor that limits the deductibility of medical expenses.

[Anonymous]

Not sure what you mean by tax deduction. As the PP says, even if counseling is a medical expense, you have to incur a whole lot of medical expenses (used to be 7.5% of your total income) before you could deduct them.

It might be that you can count them as health care expenses for purposes of a health care flexible spending account (FSA), in which case they'd be essentially tax-deductible because you could pay for them with untaxed income.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not sure what you mean by tax deduction. As the PP says, even if counseling is a medical expense, you have to incur a whole lot of medical expenses (used to be 7.5% of your total income) before you could deduct them.

It might be that you can count them as health care expenses for purposes of a health care flexible spending account (FSA), in which case they'd be essentially tax-deductible because you could pay for them with untaxed income.

I'm not sure what I mean either. I was just relaying a confusing conversation with the marriage counselor the best I could