As early as 2007, here’s how much it cost to care for all Americans with type 2 diabetes:

• $116 billion in Direct Costs (i.e. their medical care)
• Approximately $58 billion in Indirect Costs (i.e. disability benefits, money lost through work absences, premature death)

This all adds up to a grand total of $194 billon, or 10% of all healthcare dollars spent in the United States.

Let’s take a look at this issue on an individual level. The medical care for a person with diabetes is twice as expensive as the care for a person without diabetes.

On top of this, 16% of Americans with serious ...

On July 14^th, The House of Representatives introduced America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 (HR 3200) .

All across the nation, people are struggling to pay the bills and feed their families. Now, add to this the cost of healthcare, which we all know is on the rise. The economy is still in a recession and people are putting off doctor visits, delaying needed medical care and opting not to fill prescriptions.

Healthcare costs are a huge strain on the budgets of so many Americans, especially those who are critically ill. Many people—even those with employer-provided insurance—who are critically ill face a very difficult dilemma in light of economic pressures, they could either:

• Keep up the treatments and fall into medical debt
• Postpone or cut back on treatments they need to beat their disease (and in some cases stay alive) to avoid overwhelming debts
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Everyone needs to know about wills and healthcare proxies. These documents are there to ensure that, in the event of an untimely severe illness, injury or death, all important decisions are taken care of for you in a way that you’d want them to be made.

Many carriers offer free will preparation services that help you create, execute and store your will. A healthcare proxy is an important legal document that employees should know about and complete.

The following will tell you a little bit more about what will preparation and the healthcare proxy are and why they are important for your employees.

Will Preparation Services:

The Healthy Families Act would mandate that employers with 15 or more employees provide up to 56 hours of paid sick leave each year to both full-time and part time employees. Under this bill, workers would accrue one paid sick leave hour for each 30 hours that they work and would become eligible to use these benefits after 60 days of employment. Employees would be able to roll over unused sick leave into subsequent calendar years.

Under this proposed law, covered paid leave would include any of the following:

• Recovery from a routine illness or care for a family member that is ill
• A doctor’s appointment and o ...

On July 1, 2009, a new plan design—the partially self-funded plan—became available in Massachusetts. This plan design saves small and mid-size firms anywhere from 5-50% in group healthcare costs and alleviates a couple of the biggest pains associated with traditional fully-funded health insurance.

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Let’s face it, our nation is not getting the most out of the $2.6 trillion we spend on health care. As such, United Health Group’s Center for Reform and Modernization has looked in to ways the industry can achieve substantial cost savings via technology in a recent working paper.

United Health Group estimates that the healthcare industry’s administrative expenditures are about $290 billion per-year. If the industry puts their working paper’s suggestions into practice and leverages technology to its fullest, the Group estimates a total savings of $332 billion in national health expenditure over the next decade. That’s roughly 33.2 billion dollars per-year. Of the proposed savings, United Health Group estimates 30 percent will go to health plans.

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In recent years, there have been multiple high profile data breaches involving third-party providers of credit card and other financial services. One of the many ways identity thieves access personal information these entities maintain is by hacking into non-password protected, unencrypted databases. Under the Massachusetts identity theft law 201 CMR 17.00,  companies that work with these third-party providers will be liable for any data security breach involving personal information of Massachusetts residents if they did not take any action to ensure that the provider was operating in full compliance with the law.

For small and mid-size businesses that work with online credit card processing companies, it is no longer safe to just assume that these companies are in compliance with the law. You must now take a look de ...