Friday, February 6, 2009

Health Savings Accounts

Health Savings Accounts

I've been looking into setting up an HSA because I am having to pay for my own health insurance now, and it might be attractive to get an health insurance plan with a high deductible in exchange for lower premium payments. When looking for information about this, I discovered something rather interesting: you can move money from an IRA into an HSA without suffering this withdrawal of money from the IRA as a taxable event--so you don't pay income tax on the withdrawal, or the 10% early withdrawal penalty. There are, of course, gobs of details and limitations written in mind-numbing gobbledygook, but this is still quite useful, since I have some money coming out of an HP retirement plan (not my 401k) that is going into an IRA that I figured would just sit there for another eight years--but this might be a useful way to put some of that money to work paying for deductibles.

HSAs ordinarily can't be used to pay for health insurance premiums--with two exceptions, one of which is currently quite useful to me:
Can I pay my health insurance premiums with an HSA?
You can only use your HSA to pay health insurance premiums if you are collecting Federal or State unemployment benefits, or you have COBRA continuation coverage through a former employer.

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