Overseas surgery and medical expense tax deductions?
 

Hello All,

I am curious to hear if anyone has been successful deducting rather large amounts of medical.expenses when getting procedures overseas? In Virginia in order to deduct your expenses must be 7.5% (might be going to 10% this tax season) of your AIG.....

When I got my neck fixed a few years ago, I was able to deduct 15k off of my taxable income.... I wonder if it is possible to do a strait deduction in the realms of 35k?

Ken, ;-)

i had an accountant do it, but i deducted mine

Nice, thank you for the reply!

I did it back in '08 but not at the amount that I could be looking at this time. My hope is that the amount deductible doesn't decline by percentage after you hit a certain amount or what not. I tried to get into TurboTax last night but the site won't be up and ready until Dec 5th...

thanks, Ken

i am no tax expert, but it looked like it came straight off.

my income for 2011 was less than half of normal so i hit the cutoff easily and it looks like it was a straight deduction.

good luck.

That's great! Glad to hear...

Thank you, Ken

We spoke with our accountant about it & she indicated that we can deduct. Too bad my income is "off" this year due to neck and me not working my butt off like I normally do! :jump:

We've ended up deducting overseas medical expenses for a number of years and have built a routine for doing it. Get the receipt of whatever sort for the procedure. Get a printout that shows the current exchange rate for foreign currency to US dollars. Make sure you include whatever fees you paid to the credit card company or bank transfer agencies. Remember that you can deduct for hotel and travel expense for the patient only, not any accompanying people. Be careful about tacking "touristy" on to your medical trip to make it easy to justify to the IRS that you traveled for medical and happened to take time to see something rather than you traveled for tourism and happened to get a medical procedure done. Consider getting some kind of CV or discussion about your surgeon's experience to point out why it was important for you to travel to get work done by them. The latter is less important but could be useful if you get into an argument over why you traveled.

you can only deduct a certain $ amount per day for hotel expenses
other medical stuff you can deduct per my accountant (check w/ an accountant or tax resource obviously):
- mileage to/from dr appointments
- copays/deductibles
- actually i was told i could deduct my friend's airfare b/c i needed a companion

IRS stipulates that travel for medical professionals only can be deducted along with the patient's travel expenses. I would imagine that it's a grey area if you were ordered by the surgeon to have assistance with your travel but it would be a really good idea to document that order.

Hotel expenses were deductible to $50/night. Pretty much the only thing that's really questionable from IRS's standpoint is OTCs and supplements.