{"id":745,"date":"2024-09-24T00:33:31","date_gmt":"2024-09-24T00:33:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=745"},"modified":"2024-09-24T00:33:31","modified_gmt":"2024-09-24T00:33:31","slug":"healthcare-spending-for-individuals-with-fsas-and-hsas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=745","title":{"rendered":"Healthcare spending for individuals with FSAs and HSAs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the U.S., health insurance premiums are tax deductible\u2013if paid through out of pocket expenses\u2013but out-of-pocket expenses are not.  However, there are exceptions to this rule.  These include two often-used tax-favored accounts: <\/p>\n<p><strong>Flexible savings accounts (FSA)<\/strong>.  These accounts allow employees to set aside a portion of their pretax income to cover qualified medical expenses; however, if the employee does not use these funds by the end of the year, they are forfeited.  <strong>Health savings accounts (HSA)<\/strong>.  HSAs also allow employees to save pretax income to cover qualified medical expenses, but\u2013unlike FSAs\u2013HSA balances roll over from year to year. While anyone with a qualified plan can enroll in an FSA, only employees who enroll in a high-deductible health plan (HDHP) are allowed to contribute to an HSA. <\/p>\n<p>How does having an FSA or HSA impact health care expenditures.   A paper by <a href=\"https:\/\/jamanetwork.com\/journals\/jama-health-forum\/fullarticle\/2823758\">Ding and Glied (2024)<\/a> use data on health care expenditures for working age adults from the 2011-2019 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) to find the answer.  Their study found that: <\/p>\n<p>\u2026families with FSAs spent a mean of 20% or $2033 (95% CI, $789-$3276) more on health care annually than non\u2013account holding families, largely due to increased insurer-paid expenses. Families with HSAs spent a mean of 44% or $697 (95% CI, $521-$873) more on out-of-pocket expenditures and had insignificantly higher insurance-paid expenditures than families without accounts, resulting in overall expenditures comparable to those of non\u2013account holders. The additional tax expenditures associated with FSAs were a mean of $1306 (95% CI, $536-$2076) annually per family. <\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/jamanetwork.com\/journals\/jama-health-forum\/fullarticle\/2823758<\/p>\n<p>You can read the full paper <a href=\"https:\/\/jamanetwork.com\/journals\/jama-health-forum\/fullarticle\/2823758\">here<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the U.S., health insurance premiums are tax deductible\u2013if paid through out of pocket expenses\u2013but out-of-pocket expenses are not. However, there are exceptions to this rule. These include two often-used tax-favored accounts: Flexible savings accounts (FSA). These accounts allow employees to set aside a portion of their pretax income to cover qualified medical expenses; however,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}