Is ACL/knee-scope recovery gear FSA or HSA eligible?

Reviewed by Erin Rose — healthcare price-transparency analyst. Last checked August 29, 2026. Part of the full ACL / knee-arthroscopy recovery checklist. No affiliate links on this page.

You're probably not on Medicare for this one. This surgery skews younger, more often employer-insured — per AAOS's own data, female athletes tear their ACL at 2 to 8 times the rate of males, from pivoting and cutting sports like soccer, basketball, and volleyball. So the coverage question that actually matters is FSA/HSA, not Medicare eligibility. Crutches are individually named as an eligible expense in IRS Publication 502; everything else on this checklist is plausible under the same publication's general rule, but not guaranteed by name. Medicare data is kept below only as a national price benchmark — for scale, not because this audience is likely billing Medicare.

The item-by-item breakdown

Crutches are the one item Publication 502 names directly. Everything else on this checklist falls under its broader definition: "the costs of equipment, supplies, and diagnostic devices needed" to treat a diagnosed condition — a real basis, but a general one, not a guarantee. State plainly which is which, rather than implying every item here is equally certain.

Does Medicare cover a knee brace after ACL surgery?

Here's the honest answer: we can't make that claim from our own data, in either direction. A hinged post-op ROM brace's closest real billing match is L1832 or L1833 ("Knee orthosis, adjustable knee joints, positional orthosis, rigid support, prefabricated") — both real, current HCPCS Level II codes. But neither appears in this site's own coverage_status.json dataset, which was built to track 68 specific codes across canes/crutches/walkers, commodes, bath/toilet safety, hospital beds, patient lifts, seat lifts, and manual wheelchairs — orthotics were never in that build's scope. That means we have no fee-schedule figure or utilization count for L1832/L1833 in our own pipeline. Rather than guess, we're stating the gap directly: ask your DME supplier or plan whether either code is billable for your specific situation.

The corrected crutches-utilization fact

Medicare's own crutches code, E0114 ("Crutches underarm, other than wood, adjustable or fixed, pair, with pads, tips and handgrips"), is covered with a doctor's prescription — a fee of $57.17–$88.73 a pair, with 44,541 services billed nationally in 2024. It's tempting to call that the highest-volume DME code Medicare tracks — an earlier research pass on this site made exactly that claim, and it doesn't hold up. Checked directly against all 68 codes in coverage_status.json: a standard manual wheelchair (K0001) leads at 1,305,390 services, a folding walker (E0143) is third at 508,460, and a commode (E0163) is sixth at 139,220. E0114 ranks 14th overall.

What is true, and the claim actually worth repeating: E0114 dominates the narrower crutches-family codes specifically — 44,541 claims against a combined 1,411 for every other crutch code (E0110–E0113, E0116, E0117) this site tracks, roughly 31.6 times more. That's a real, verified fact about which kind of crutch Medicare actually pays for most — it's just a narrower claim than "the most common DME item," and we're stating it that way here.

Why FSA/HSA, not Medicare, is the coverage story here

AAOS's own patient-education page states it directly: female athletes experience ACL injuries at rates 2 to 8 times higher than males, with the classic injury mechanism being pivoting, cutting, or jumping in sports like soccer, basketball, volleyball, and football. That's a younger, more often employer-insured population than this site's knee- and hip-replacement hubs, whose readers skew Medicare-adjacent. If you're outside that pattern — reading this for yourself or a family member who is on Medicare — the crutches fact above still applies to you directly; the rest of this checklist simply isn't something Medicare's fee schedule was built to price.