When you think about the words you might use to describe your medical insurance, words such as important and essential might come to mind. But so do costly, confusing and time-consuming, because managing your home health care expenses is not always easy or straightforward. During years when you have several health issues, it could even become cumbersome and burdensome.

Most people rely on the explanations and bills that come to them from their medical providers (doctors, hospitals, pharmacists) and insurance companies. But those can be confusing; and too often there are charges that are either unexpected or even seem like they're duplicated. That has led many to use spreadsheets or home financial management software to try to keep it under control. But these are not great solutions either -- although better than doing nothing.

Intuit, the makers of Quicken & QuickBooks have come up with several tools to help unravel the mysteries of your health-care costs. The product for health systems is called Quicken Health Expense Tracker. At this moment, unless you use Cigna insurance, this won't apply to you; but it's a lot like some of the Web sites for other insurance companies in which you are able to see what's been paid and what you still owe.

The product that intrigues me is Quicken Medical Expense Manager, a Windows-based program that you can use to track your medical expenses, no matter which health providers or insurance carriers you use.

Quicken Medical Expense Manager isn't the perfect product, but it's as close as I have seen on the consumer software shelf. With the program, you enter your family members, the names of the people and organizations that provide your medical services and the details of your health insurance coverage. Then, every time you have a medical expense, you can enter it easily in the program, allowing you to track where your money goes, determine whether you should be paying that unexpected medical bill and even keep a long-term medical history to which you can refer in the future. So whenever a doctor asks you questions, you can give him more accurate information.

I found Quicken Medical Expense Manager easy, although somewhat time-consuming, to set up; but once set up, it's easy to enter expenses and payments for every member of your family. I used it to supplement the way I use the Web site of my insurance carrier, Highmark, to more easily remember details that aren't available from the Highmark online medical tracking tools. Instead of just telling me what the doctor generically calls the service, I can put in exact references, such as "for Danny's second knee surgery on his right ACL and meniscus" instead of "Orthopaedic exam," which tells me very little.

It also lets you track the dollars paid for each service -- from you, your insurance company and your health savings account -- so you can make sure you pay only enough and no more. You also get the services onto your end-of-year tax statements for maximum deductions.

The biggest problems I have found with the program is the lack of reporting. Normally, I expect to see more reports as software becomes mature; but Intuit seems to be emphasizing the Quicken Health Expense Tracker over Quicken Medical Expense Manager. So I'm not expecting it to develop the reports to make this product really shine.

I also had a data corruption problem when backing up. So if you use the product, you should back up frequently by simply copying your data file instead of using the product's own backup routines. Otherwise, the Quicken tools are a welcome relief to insurance overload.