Offering spending accounts to your employees can be an effective way to help contain health costs for both your business and your employees. With UPMC Consumer Advantage, you can choose from three distinct employee health care spending accounts that can enhance your employee benefits package, improve employee health and productivity, potentially decrease your health care costs, and reduce your payroll taxes. Learn about the many options available to groups of all sizes.

Health savings accounts (HSA)
Employees can use an HSA to pay for qualified health care expenses and save for future expenses. Employers can contribute to their employees’ HSAs and allow for employees’ payroll contributions. Employees can also make contributions outside of payroll contributions, which are tax-free. Interest earned and dollars spent on qualified health care expenses are tax-free as well. Employees can also invest their dollars once they reach a certain level of savings. Participation in an HSA must always be linked to a qualified high-deductible health plan (QHDHP).

Health care flexible spending accounts (FSA)
Your employees can use their health care FSA to pay for qualified health care expenses including medical, dental, and vision expenses, plus prescription drugs that are not covered by their insurance plan. As the employer, you don’t pay payroll taxes on the savings your employees accumulate.

Limited purpose health care flexible spending accounts: Similar to a health care FSA, a limited purpose health care FSA reimburses only dental, vision, and preventive care. Participation in this type of FSA allows employees to participate in a qualified health savings account.

Health reimbursement arrangements (HRA)
HRAs are employee spending accounts that employers fund. Your employees can use their HRAs to help pay for health care deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses. Funds that the employer contributes to the HRA are not considered wages and are not subject to income taxes, FICA (Social Security and Medicare), or workers’ compensation.

Health incentive accounts (HIA)
A HIA is a reimbursement account tied to a medical plan that encourages healthy activities and consumer engagement. The HIA gives employees the opportunity to earn reward dollars on a UPMC Consumer Advantage debit card that they can use to pay for eligible medical and pharmacy expenses including their deductible, coinsurance, and copayments, as well as other out-of-pocket expenses.

Qualified transportation accounts (QTA)
A QTA allows employees to make pretax contributions to pay for qualified transit and parking expenses related to their commute to work. Employers that offer a QTA option can also allow funds to roll over from year to year.

Dependent care reimbursement accounts (DCA)
A DCA allows employees to set aside up to $5,000 annually to offset costs associated with the care of eligible children or elderly dependents—such as daycare or babysitter expenses, before- and after-school programs for children under 13, and adult daycare centers. (Employees may set aside up to $2,500 if they are married and file separate federal income tax returns.)

Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSA)
An LSA is an employer-funded, post-tax benefit account that reimburses employees for certain non-medical (excludes 213(d) expenses) and lifestyle-related expenses including classes, activity trackers, financial advisors, life coaching and more.

UPMC Consumer Advantage also gives your employees access to a range of tools to help them manage their plan, including:

An all-in-one website for employees to manage their spending account, featuring single sign-on access from the UPMC Health Plan member site, receipt uploading and expense tracking capabilities, debit card management and much more.
The convenient UPMC Consumer Advantage mobile app where employees can manage their spending account from anywhere.

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UPMC Consumer Advantage Spending Accounts