As part of the ARRA Act passed earlier this year, several legislative changes were made to HIPAA. These changes were documented in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act.

Among other things, the HITECH Act:

• Added breach notification rules to HIPAA
• Extended the privacy responsibilities of covered entities to their business associates—This means that business associates of HIPAA covered entities ar ...

As many of you know, the health care reform bill just recently passed in the House of Representatives, but it still needs to pass through the Senate.

This next step could prove to be very difficult as the Senate and House only agree on a few things.

Among these are:

• A pay or play mandate for individualsà The House bill, the Senate HELP Committee bill and the Senate Finance Committee bill all require individuals to pay an annual penalty if they do not have qualifying health insurance coverage.

Legislators introduced a bill last week that, if passed, would require employers to provide at least five paid sick days to employees sent home (and told to stay home) with a contagious illness. The bill is called the Emergency Influenza Containment Act and was introduced by Representative George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.

If signed into law, the Emergency Influenza Containment Act would take effect 15 days after being signed and expire after 2 years.

Who would be impacted?

The Emergency Influenza Containment A ...

The House of Representatives introduced a new bill that would extend the ARRA Act’s COBRA premium subsidy 6 months. The bill would also extend COBRA subsidy eligibility to a new group of laid off workers.

COBRA Subsidy Recap:

As you may already know, the government passed a law giving employees who were “involuntarily terminated” between September 1, 2008 and December 31, 2009, a 65% COBRA health care premium subsidy. The COBRA subsidy became available to these Assistance Eligible Individuals (AEIs) March 1, 2009. AEIs could collect the subsidy for 9 months or until their COBRA eligibility ran out, whichever came first.

By a vote of 220-215, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act bill. This 1,990 page bill was created by merging separate health bills produced by the House Energy and Commerce, Education and Labor, and Ways and Means committees. It passed with the support of 219 Democrats and one Republican.

Here’s what the bill will do (among other things):

• Require health insurers to sell coverage on a guaranteed issue, mostly community-rated basis.
• Impose a 5.4% surtax on individuals with annual incomes over $500,000 and couples with annual in ...

The CLASS (short for Community Living Services and Support) Act, if passedwould create government-run long term care insurance available to anyone (even those who are already disabled). Currently, more than 10 million Americans need long-term care, and this number is only expected to go up as the Baby Boomer generation ages.

Here’s how the proposed plan would work.

Individuals would be automatically enrolled unless they opted out. While still actively working, they’d pay premiums in exchange for a cash benefit of at least $50 per-day in the event that they become disabled. Individuals could use this benefit to cover home care and adult day care services as well as assisted living and nursing home care services.

As you may know, Massachusetts’ upcoming law Standards for the Protection of Personal Information of Residents of the Commonwealth (201 CMR 17.00), requires all businesses that “own, license, store and maintain” personal information on any Massachusetts resident to create and implement a Written Information Security Plan (WISP).

Your WISP needs to be comprehensive and it must spell out all of your technical, physical and administrative safeguards for your personal information. If you’re company already has a WISP and it’s good to go for March 1, you’re definitely one step ahead of the game. However, you’re not off the hook just yet. You’ll need to continuously re-evaluate your plan in order to stay compliant.

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We’ve all probably heard of the traditional formula for calculating the cost of replacing a terminated (voluntary or involuntary) salaried employee, one and a half times the exiting employee’s annual salary right?

Well, according to Watson-Wyatt Worldwide’s model for calculating the true-cost of replacing a salaried employee, the one and a half times their salary figure is just a piece of the pie. Here’s why.

This figure consists of the actual out-of-pocket costs (i.e. cost of advertising your job vacancy, cost of working with recruiters to fill the now ...

Q: The following are used to store and/or communicate employee benefits information.

1. Files on your hard drive

2. A fax machine

3. An HRIS system

...