[GNC] Handling medical bills

[Adrien Monteleone]

It seems your asking a 'modeling' question.

As I understand your explanation, I'd think of it this way:

The provider bills should be individually raised in A/P as liabilities 
using the Bill feature.

The Insurance and Medicare EOBs are 'statements' that indicate 3rd-party 
partial payments towards those liabilities.

So raise the bills as you get them.

Enter the payments by the 3rd-parties as you get the EOBs. (if some are 
in advance of receiving the provider bill, they are initially 
'unattached' which you'll have to apply later)

If you are responsible for any self/co-pays, enter those when completed 
as regular payments against the respective bill.

You'd need to find a 'source' account to fund the 3rd-party payments. 
I'm not exactly sure where you'd put that in your account tree. That 
would be an accounting question, which is likely out of scope here, but 
someone may have good suggestions. (are benefit payments considered 
'income'? or just phantom 'assets'? There might be some jujitsu of 
treating the 3rd-party payments as A/R then using some intermediary 
account to allow you to apply them to A/P.)

Regards,
Adrien

On 7/24/25 12:03 PM, Ed Greenberg wrote:
> I'm drowning in my aged parents medical bills. Their bills get sent to
> Medicare for payment, then to a third party insurance company, then to me
> for a co-payment.
> 
> Mostly I'm trying to make sure that I don't pay anything that isn't
> represented by a finalized explanation of benefits (EOB), and that I don't
> pay anything twice.
> 
> Here's what I'm doing, and I wonder if anyone is doing similar and can
> weigh in with a better process.
> 
> Once a month, Medicare produces an EOB, and on some irregular schedule, the
> third party insurance produces an EOB.
> 
> Sometimes the provider bills me before the EOBs show up and sometimes
> after.  The only way to know what is a duplicate is by the provider name
> coupled with the date of service.
> 
> When by process EOBs, I create incoming accounts payable records. This
> gives me an easy record of what has come in before. When I receive bills
> from providers I try to match them up with what exists in gnucash. If I
> can't, and I can't find an EOB on the various websites, I create an
> incoming accounts payable record.
> 
> If I have all the ducks in a row as indicated by the accounts payable
> record, the "bill," then I can pay the bill.
> 
> This is a pretty new process for me, and if anybody has any suggestions on
> how to enhance it, I would be interested in hearing of it.
> 
> Ed Greenberg