<p>I'm wonder if anyone with high medical bills has any experience with FA? Apparently that isn't taken into consideration with the FAFSA. Any experience?</p>
<p>My dad was in the hospital for a while and we ended up with thousands of dollars in medical bills, and you’re right, they aren’t taken into consideration. But we sent in a special circumstances letter. It wasn’t a lot of help, but we did get us a bit more aid.</p>
<p>Thanks, unfortunately it will be an ongoing situation so the bills will rack up every year… doesn’t give me great hope we will get much…</p>
<p>You send a copy of the bills and the payments you make and ask for professional judgement. Sometimes you get something.</p>
<p>Your medical bills would be looked at by EACH college via a special circumstances consideration request. You would have to contact each college to find out their process for these. You will be asked to provide verification for the need for these medical expenses, as well as documentation of the costs and what insurance did not pay. The colleges make these decisions themselves, and it is possible to get a change made by some colleges and none by others.</p>
<p>So…contact EACH college and find out what you need to do ASAP.</p>
<p>Hi Thumper 1, we submitted documents to one school, it was just the first fax, 40 pages long and now they want more documents to continue… doctors letters and contracts. I can’t imagine doing this for every school… Now we’re going through the fafsa verification as a result on top of it, I don’t know if it’s actually worth it?</p>
<p>Yes, unfortunately, lots of experience. It can help increase your deduction if you itemize medical expenses on your federal taxes. So that’s one way it can affect FAFSA.</p>
<p>If you do a CSS Profile, you can indicate on the form and in the explanations/special circumstances section.</p>
<p>You can write a letter of special circumstances to the Financial Aid office. Often, you can ask them if it can be e-mailed to your rep there.</p>
<p>If the medical problems affected income, of course they will show up in that way.</p>
<p>One other important thing to think about is, if the student is the one with medical expenses, to make sure he or she registers with the disabilities office and has a plan in place with accommodations for any medical issues that come up.</p>
<p>We have been documenting our out of pocket medical expenses since 2002, for all four children… Sometimes we get an allowance for it… I usually make a master copy at home, then take to copy shop and they staple with a heavy duty stapler…it can vary from school to school that your children apply/enroll to, I have seen it must exceed 7.5%, 10%, 15% of your AGI, so it varies for private colleges.</p>
<p>Insurance premiums for health insurance that are tax deferred (section 125) do not usually count.</p>
<p>I itemized nearly $20k in medical bills, which is typical. The college said since I already got a reduction on my taxable income, the bills could not count as a special circumstance because that would be double dipping. I plan to file a special circumstance form anyway, with a marked up tax return showing the paltry amount I saved on taxes and asking them them to deduct that amount from the 4X amount they reduced the kids Pell grants this year. I don’t know if it will work.
They thought it would be simple to just copy one medical bill and give it to them. Wrong, this is death by a thousand cuts. I have 400 possible combinations of family members, providers, partial insurance reimbursements to wade through and it is miserable. They want a different format than taxes – copies of each bill.</p>
<p>In our experience, they want the bills AND the explanation of benefits to see what insurance did and didn’t pay. And then they also want evidence of what you paid…canceled checks, receipts from the doctors, credits card bills…whatever.</p>
<p>They need to verify the service, the need for the service, what was paid by insurance and what you paid out of pocket.</p>
<p>If you want them to consider giving you money, then you submit the documentation.
If it isn’t worth it to you, then don’t.
In our experience, EFC was not lowered.</p>