Subject: Medical care spending accounts Comment: My wife is enrolled in a medical care spending account at work. The IRS tax code associated with this is inherently unfair. Each year, we must try to guess how much medical expense we will have next year. If we opt for too much money in the account, we lose the excess, therefore each year we must try to find extra expenses to use up that excess,or deplete the fund early because we did not set aside enough. Why not roll the excess into social security or medicaid? Everyone who contributes to a medical spending account also pays into social security. By rolling excess funds over to social security (or a private ss account as proposed by the President), the money still goes for the benefit of the wage earner. Under this proposal,a person can contribute what he/she can afford to a medical spending account for use for medical expenses incurred during the current year. If that person is blessed with good health and does not need the money for such expenses, those funds would roll over the following year,either to a personal retirement account, such as the President has proposed, or to that wage earner's social security account. I'm sure there are other details to be worked out, but it seems to me that people would be more willing to use medical care spending accounts if the resulting rules were fair and excess funds are not forfeited. Sincerely Philip L Demson |