Our plan used to cover vitamins, which was great for buying Emergen-C when we were sick, but it doesn't anymore.
Anyway, my question is how exactly the debit cards work. For example, I buy a lot of our OTC medications from Walgreens and they have an F (or some other indicator) that shows that it in an item that qualifies for the plan. Can I use the card at Walgreens and it will pay for that portion of my bill and then I just pay the remaining balance? Also, our insurance has a $25 copay, so I see how I would pay that with the debit card, but if there are any tests, etc. run at the doctors office, we have to pay a percentage on those, but we don't know what it is exactly until we get the explanation of benefits form from the insurance co, so how do you submit those type of expenses that you don't immediately know?
As far as I know, and we have Wage Works FSA, you can't pay "after the fact" with the card. So if you're there at Walgreens you can pay right then. But you can't pay *with the card* when you get your insurance statement and bill from the doc with the copay amount on it. For that you have to set up a "pay my provider" thing or you send in payment to the doc then get reimbursed by direct deposit or check after submitting it to the FSA. OR, as we have done, send the invoice from the doc to the FSA plan, get reimbursed, and then send that to the doc (but you have to be FAST and responsible to do that).
As for the combined allowed and not allowed purchases, we can't do it anymore. We were trying to buy a book for DS who had been patient while waiting, and a prescription for my hubby at the same time, figuring we'd just send a check to Wage Works for the book, but the register wouldn't let us do it. So we made two payments, one from the FSA card and one from our normal card.
BrettS, you need to have a long sit-down with your HR/insurance person. The FSA plans available to those with HSAs that they contribute to are different, and cover different things. If you look
here, you see that there are two columns. One for HSA compatible FSA, and one for the regular FSA.
We have an HRA but we can NOT contribute to it, so we are eligible for the normal FSA (don't ask me why, it just is what it is). We have a 3K deductible, and
amazon gives us 1500 up front. For some unknown reason hubby only set up the FSA with 1200 (all FSA moneys are available to us from the start of the plan year, even though we're only funding it 100 at a time). We had a long convo last night about insurance, and it turns out he has BARELY been listening to me for a year about all this stuff (for a few months I was trying to warn him that the situation we're in was about to happen, but he didn't hear me at all, even though we actually had back and forth *conversations* about it all!). So we've had two big expenditures from our FSA that didn't go through insurance first, so we're 500 down in the FSA but have 1100 left of out of pocket deductible to pay! Ruh roh!
Careful planning is important.
And I can't even get hubby to explain why we funded the FSA so heavily, since until last month we had every expectation of having most of the 1500 funded HRA left to roll over to next year!
Anyway, you need to think about your situation. If you expect to use all of your HRA funds that are given to you and expect to go well into your portion of the deductible, fund it nicely. If you don't expect that to happen, fund it with caution, b/c FSAs are "use it or lose it", unless the HRA.
I can't imagine having a situation like you've described, where you only get half of the company's funding up front then the other half, and then only having what you put in each month! Sounds like they've been burned by employees using their money then quitting and refusing to pay it back.
If our HRA were like that, we would just go with a normal insurance plan, because it takes all the convenience out of things. Get into a catastrophic situation, and what on earth would you do, ya know? Little appts here and there are one thing, and are workable in your situation, but not in a hospitalization situation.
And also, in our experience, if you use your FSA you can't then submit to insurance and be reimbursed. So in your case I don't think you could use the FSA account to pay for something that is more than is in your HRA account *at that time*, and then later be reimbursed from the HRA account once there is more available in there. So until you were DONE with your employer-funded HRA funds, I don't think the FSA would be good to use.
Honestly the way your employer does it makes no sense!
. I do have the option to get an FSA with my company, but I never have done so. In fact, I never really even seriously considered it until I read this thread (For those who are wondering, it always seemed too confusing and like too much work to try to figure out how much I would use and to make sure I didn't lose any money at the end of the year). 
