Did you know that you could retire with more money and reduce your current taxable income!  Challenge yourself to increase the amount you’re putting into your employer’s retirement plan by one percent or more each year and you could potentially boost your retirement savings by thousands of dollars!  See for yourself with this example.

The new Medicare premiums and deductibles have been announced for 2010.  To read more about these changes click here.

AARP's Benefits QuickLINK website that helps people apply for state, federal and private benefits, has added new features.

Starting this month, you can apply online at www.aarp.org/quicklink for Medicare Rx Extra Help, a prescription drug assistance program for limited-income beneficiaries.  New, too, are public-benefits fact sheets for each state and an Applications Forms Center that lets you print applications for some 250 benefits programs.  (Source - AARP Bulletin April 2008)

Universal Life insurance offers an inexpensive alternative for providing permanent protection.  Many carriers offer this type of policy with a guaranteed death benefit up to age 120.

Is it time to review your life insurance coverage?  Contact Brent Price at Albers & Company for information or to review your policy.

The average daily cost of a private room in a nursing home in the Unites States is $203 per day or $74,095 annually according to the annual MetLife Market Survey of Nursing Home & Home Care Costs, conducted by the company’s Mature Market Institute®. The cost represents a 5.7% increase from last year’s $192. The highest rates, once again, were reported in Alaska where the cost is $531 per day.

Seattle, Washington reported $249 per day. Factoring in an average stay of 2 years & 4 months; this means that the cost of an average stay in a Seattle nursing home could add up to a whopping $218,000! If you apply an inflation rate of 5% (the actual 20-year trend rate is slightly higher), you can anticipate this expense doubling within 15 years!

A 55 year old Baby Boomer could reasonably anticipate paying $578,000 if they required care in 20 years! Long-term care insurance offers an affordable solution to protect you against a potentially devastating blow to your retirement nest egg.

For more information about long-term care, go to www.albersltc.com. If you have specific questions, we can help! Contact Brent Price here at Albers & Company at (253) 596-0613.

The Washington Drug Card program is now available to all Washington residents. The program, which is free to all Washingtonians and provides savings of up to 75 percent on prescription drugs, can now be accessed by visiting any Safeway pharmacy location in Washington. Safeway has been named the preferred pharmacy for the statewide program, while the benefits are accepted at more than 50,000 national and regional pharmacies around the country. To find out more about this program click here.

On April 27, 2010, the IRS issued Notice 2010-38, relating to the tax exclusion for medical care reimbursement of adult children.  Click here to read more.

Information is available about topics such as pay and overtime, workplace poster requirements, health benefits, re-employment rights for uniformed service members, and federal contractor compliance.

The Internal Revenue Service recently launched a new web page that provides guidance on tax credits in the new health reform law for small employers and tax-exempt organizations that provide health insurance coverage.  Click here to read more...

Click here to read more about where things stand and how you and your employees might be affected.

The Internal Revenue Service announced that the maximum contribution levels for retirement plans will not increase for 2010 because of a falling cost-of-living index. To read the full story, click here.

The IRS has released the 2010 cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for a wide variety of tax benefit limits, including limits relating to qualified transportation fringe benefits, adoption assistance, dependent care assistance programs (DCAPs), and Archer MSAs.

• Qualified Transportation Fringe Benefits. For 2010, the monthly limit on the amount that may be excluded from an employee's income for qualified parking benefits will be $230, which is unchanged from the 2009 limit. The combined limit for transit passes and vanpooling expenses is also unchanged at $230 due to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Tax Act of 2009 (ARRA).
  
• Adoption Assistance Exclusion/Adoption Credit. The maximum amount that may be excluded from an employee's gross income under an employer-provided adoption assistance program (under Code Section 137 ) for the adoption of a child will be $12,170 for 2010 (a $20 increase from 2009). In addition, the maximum adoption credit allowed to an individual (under Code Section 23 ) for the adoption of a child will be $12,170 for 2010. Both the exclusion and the credit will begin to be phased out for individuals with a modified adjusted gross income greater than $182,520 ($340 higher than 2009), and will be entirely phased out for individuals with a modified adjusted gross income of $222,520 or more (also $340 higher than 2009).

To read a full copy of this IRS publication, click here.

Congress enacted a law (Section 6202 of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989) to provide the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), formerly the Health Care Financing Administration, with better information about Medicare beneficiaries' group health plan (GHP) coverage.

The law requires the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Social Security Administration SSA), and CMS to share information that each agency has about whether Medicare beneficiaries or their spouses are working. The process for sharing this information is called the IRS/SSA/CMS Data Match.

The purpose of the Data Match is to identify situations where another payer may be primary to Medicare.

Employers are required to complete a questionnaire that requests GHP information on identified workers who are either entitled to Medicare or married to a Medicare beneficiary. This information is used to identify the primary and secondary payers for medical services provided to a Medicare beneficiary. This process helps Medicare identify claims on an ongoing basis for which Medicare should not be the primary payer.

The Data Match Project has saved the Medicare Trust Funds more than 3.5 billion dollars to date.

If you are an employer that has recently received this Data Match questionnaire, you can use this guide book as a reference tool for how to complete the questionnaire.  If you have additional questions feel free to contact us for assistance.

A new wave of technological advances has brought fresh meaning to "chatting with your neighbors" about global issues. After a few clicks on your home computer, you can be connected to someone across the globe in seconds. Blogs about pretty much any topic can be found, and are used by an increasing number of people.

That's why Regence is also offering a venue to connect with members, providers and the general public about a variety of health topics, including the transformation of health care through a new Web site we have developed at www.ReinventHealthCare.com.

Disparities in hospital quality persist, as patients treated at top-quality hospitals are nearly one-third less likely to die than those admitted to all other hospitals, reports HealthGrades, a health care ratings company. Poor-quality care in a hospital deals a blow to employers through higher medical costs, longer leaves of absence and even the loss of employees.

Hospitals ranked in the top 5% nationally had on average a 28% lower mortality rate and a 5% lower complications rate, HealthGrades notes. These findings highlight “a troubling phenomenon: a preventable gap between high-quality hospitals and the rest of the field," the company states. “158,264 lives may have been saved and 12,410 major complications avoided” if the level of care at all hospitals had equaled that at the top performers during the three years studied.

To identify the hospitals in the top 5%, HealthGrades analyzed nearly 39 million hospitalizations in 2003, 2004 and 2005 at 4,971 non-federal, non-children’s, short-term acute care hospitals. To find out if your network hospitals are among HealthGrades’ “Distinguished Hospitals for Clinical Excellence,” check out the free listings at HealthGrades.com. The site also sells detailed quality reports on individual hospitals.

Washington State Hospital Association has unveiled a Web site that will give consumers and competitors information about cost of services and quality information. All 97 hospitals in Washington are members, and offer data by clicking the "Hospital Transparency" window icon at www.wsha.org.

"Reliable information allows patients and purchasers to make informed decisions about where they choose to seek care. It also helps policy makers and the public measure the cost and quality of hospital care," said Leo Greenawalt, president of the Washington State Hospital Association.

The site will offer: pricing information, including hospital-specific charges for more than 500 types of hospital treatments; quality data, including hospital-specific performance on quality indicators relating to treatment various ailments; and billing information, including common questions about hospital bills and information about the availability of charity care and financial assistance.

Today, we're learning more and more about the way our health needs change over time.

While some things never change, like the need for a healthy diet, regular exercise and a positive attitude, other aspects of your health are simply due to your stage of life.  Read more on the Go Red for Women site. 

And while you’re there, mark your calendars for next year’s Go Red for Women celebration day, Friday February 5th 2010

Recently, the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine announced new recommendations for the amount of physical activity most adults should be getting every day. Check out the official report.

Today's medicines are more complex and powerful than ever before. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) MedMaster™ database can help you find the important information you need to use medications safely and effectively.

SafeMedication.com features complete, easy-to-read information on more than 800 drugs. It is based on ASHP's premier, unbiased drug information resources, which are developed independently by pharmacists and other medication experts.

Tired of trying to make sense of what you should eat and why? The American Heart Association offers easy-to-follow recommendations which will help you focus on making healthy choices without having to scrutinize every last bite. Your eating patterns are one of the best weapons you have to prevent heart disease.

This might not be the most comfortable topic to talk about, but it is a very important one. Human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted infection, is the most common cause of cervical cancer and therefore, the release of a vaccine to protect against it is important to announce. Learn more about the recent findings and who should get vaccinated.