No, health savings account is not for paying your medical insurance premium. It is a kind of convenience account that allow you to contribute money over the year and use it to pay your current or future medical/dental/etc cost. for example, if your company provide this benefit, and you decide to put $240 in it for the year, you would pay $10 per pay check into it, but if you got sick in Feb and paid out of pocket expense (after insurance claims and such) of $100, you can use $100 of the $240 out of your HSA, even though you haven't contributed that much money yet.
A lot of people do this through their company's benefit program, which most of the time your contribution is taken out before tax, so you wouldn't pay tax on that money anyways. And the company should exclude this part of the money from your W2 gross income. Then you won't need to do anything on your tax return.
But for some people they do this with a 3rd-party service, or somewhere that the contribution is not pre-tax, so they can include this on their return to get some deduction because this money should be part or fully tax-free.
A US Treasury link for some more info.
http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/public-affairs/hsa/
Hope this helps.
A lot of people do this through their company's benefit program, which most of the time your contribution is taken out before tax, so you wouldn't pay tax on that money anyways. And the company should exclude this part of the money from your W2 gross income. Then you won't need to do anything on your tax return.
But for some people they do this with a 3rd-party service, or somewhere that the contribution is not pre-tax, so they can include this on their return to get some deduction because this money should be part or fully tax-free.
A US Treasury link for some more info.
http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/public-affairs/hsa/
Hope this helps.
