Year End Receipts

There are some purchases that we make that are directly for my health. Over-the-counter medications like Gravol, Robaxacet, and Motion Medicine Muscle Cream, then dietary items like Boost (when my intestines are rejecting food), the canes that I use for walking on days when my hips have complete bitched out, as well as parking payments at the hospital for appointments and trips to the Emergency Room.
We always keep these receipts, if nothing more than for our own records.

So, for 2017 (which was a quieter year for appointments overall), we spent about $300 just on parking at Foothills. We spent just under $1k on things like Boost and Gravol, and then another $1k on other health-related items like optometry, medicinal therapies currently not covered, and portions of dental that weren't covered.
A thousand dollars is a LOT of Gravol and Boost.

Now - I am lucky and I have absolutely amazing coverage overall. My pharmaceutical medications are almost always 100% covered. So the amount that we paid out of pocket is a tiny, little, miniscule fraction of what our coverage pays for.
I am more than happy to spend $2k+ and have everything else covered.
Whenever I feel like complaining about coverage, slap me! Because we are very fortunate. Canadians are fortunate. Our system has MANY flaws, the system is broken in various areas (help for the chronically ill and those in chronic pain being one), but I still 100% appreciate the system we DO have in place. Improvements need to be made, absolutely, but not a complete overhaul. We have the base system in place, it just needs some tweaking ;).

I am interested to know what my prescribed medications WOULD HAVE cost us if we did not have coverage. Maybe I will look at that later.