What needs to be done?

Actually, Hawaii is doing extremely well in terms of making sure its citizens get the proper health care and medical insurance. The island chain was the very first state to make it mandatory that employers provide medical insurance for their workers. Most of the employees in Hawaii are granted avoidable hospital use and other medical costs. Because of this, Hawaii boasts a healthier workforce and population, and thus, has the longest lifespan of all 50 states.
However, as good as Hawaii's rankings are in terms of health care coverage, there is a rising problem at hand. The cost of health care and insurance premiums for employers is get increasingly expensive. In order to counter such an inflation in prices, the employers are left with only two options: cut employees or find ways around having to provide health insurance for their workers. Cutting employees is pretty self explanatory. In order to make sure that money is not being siphoned off too quickly from their vaults, employers will lay off their workers. Finding ways around having to provide health benefits for employees is something completely different. Employers that are usually trying to beat the system are the larger companies who have hundreds of employees working for them. Obviously paying for the health benefits of hundreds of workers puts quite a dent in the pockets of the employers. One way of avoiding having to pay is by hiring only part time workers. The law states that employers only have to cover the health costs of their FULL TIME employees. By allowing their workers to work only in 4-5 hour shifts, companies don't have to pay for health premiums.
So what exactly is causing the prices of health care to rise? Factors such as new, more expensive technologies, medical lawsuits, lack of "reinsurance", inflation, and economic fluctuations all affect the costs of health premiums. Reinsurance is, to put simply, insurance for the insurance companies. The number of companies willing to provide insurance for other insurance companies is falling since the number of lawsuits are increasing. Health insurance companies need the reinsurance to prevent catastrophic losses (i.e. mass lawsuits). Economic fluctuations are changes in the market for health premiums. An insurance company needs to find the right balance between cost and risk. If risk, the chances of something really bad happening to the client, rises, then the cost must also go up.
At the moment, there is only one sure-fire way of reducing the costs of health premiums. The government must provide some money to companies to help cover the health costs of their employees. There should be some sort of system where, based on the number of workers who are being covered by the company, the employee gets a certain amount of money to help pay off health care costs. The government should also do something about companies who are hiring only part time workers (i.e. Walmart). Those companies should at least give partial coverage of health care if not whole coverage.

http://www.nal.usda.gov/ric/ricpubs/RHNsprsum02.htm
http://www.hawaiihealthguide.com/healthtalk/display.htm?id=580