My husband has HSA and health insurance that is family plan also cover me. It is a HDHP coverage but the account holder is my husband. So did I have HDHP coverage?

[AnthonyC · Accepted solution]

Yes, you have HDHP coverage, but if you were covered under his plan, then see this - 

When going through the questions, you will get to a screen entitled "What type of High Deductible Health Plan did [spouse (you)] have on December 1st 2016?" (see screenshot below).  

If your spouse (you) was covered under your health insurance plan, then you should select "none" not "family or self-only." You are selecting none because your spouse (you) does not have their own coverage, they are covered under your (his) plan.  If you select one of the other options, then you will get a notification about a coverage lapse.  

[pongojoe]

Can you explain this more? If the spouse does have HDHP coverage as she is on her husband's account, why does she say "none" when asked if she had HDHP coverage? Second, what is the coverage lapse referred to here?

[stephen_lin35]

TurboTax is handling this issue in a very confusing and counterintuitive way, and the fact that it doesn't actually explain things only makes matters worse.  I had the exact same questions as pongojoe.   Assuming it is correct, this answer is very useful.   But it shouldn't have gotten to this point in the first place.   Intuit should fix this and explain it more clearly.

[BMcCalpin]

What is actually happening is this:

There is a question that every taxpayer (with an HSA or not) should answer: "What type of High Deductible Health Plan did [name] have on December 1, 2016?" The reason for this question is that IF you had an HSA in 2016 and IF you contributed under an obscure rule called the "last-month" rule to use the full annual HSA contribution limit even though you were not under HDHP for all of 2016, then you are required to have stayed under HDHP for all of 2017.

Really.

But if you didn't have an HSA at all, you didn't go through the HSA interview. If you didn't go through the HSA interview, you never showed that you had HDHP coverage in 2017 (of course not).

But when you answered "Family" or "Self" to the question "What type of High Deductible Health Plan did [name] have on December 1, 2016?", you told TurboTax that you had HDHP coverage in 2016 - although this was often by mistake. You apparently had coverage in 2016 but no coverage in 2017, so TurboTax thinks that you ran afoul of the last-month rule. But if you had no HSA and no HDHP coverage in 2016, then you should have answered "None", because the last-month rule didn't apply to you.

Yes, it is obscure. The problem is often rooted in the fact that when TurboTax asks about HDHP coverage, many taxpayers who don't have HDHP coverage don't realize that this question doesn't even apply to them, so they should answer "None". Yes, I am sure that next year, it will be clearer.

[arnellabrn]

Thank you TurboTax Anthony … I have an additional question. The HDHP is a Cobra HDHP. The insured leaves the HDHP at age 65 and goes to Medicare. The spouse continues to be covered under the Cobra HDHP. To complicate matters the insured funded the HSA in February with the max (well almost) allowed. He switches to Medicare in July but the spouse continues on the Cobra HDHP. Did we overfund HSA or since the spouse continues on Cobra HDHP … is there an exception?