America’s health-care system is broken.

Often, the key piece of evidence is the almost 46 million people who do not have health insurance. But another factor is the yearly rate of increase in payments for those people who do have health insurance.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, premiums for people who purchase their insurance through an employer have increased 73 percent since 2000. And while the rate of growth for 2005 dipped below double digits, premiums still increased by 9.2 percent.

Dare say, the number of people whose income has increased 73 percent since 2000 or 9.2 percent in 2005 is pretty low. Wages just aren’t keeping up, averaging just 2.7 percent more than 2004. Taken together with the rising cost of energy – especially gasoline and heating oil – workers firmly in the middle class are having to make difficult decisions about how they spend their money. Salaries aren’t keeping up with inflation, which has prices increasing 3.5 percent in 2005.

More and more are being forced to drop their insurance coverage and curtail their discretionary spending. In an economy dependent upon consumer spending, such inflationary pressures threaten to stall the economy and put in jeopardy many families’ standards of living.

Despite increasing costs, employer-sponsored coverage is the most common way that people purchase insurance, accounting for about 60 percent of the insured population under the age of 65. The strains on that system, however, threaten to leave more people on their own. Since 2000, the rate of businesses providing health insurance to their workers has declined from 69 percent to 60 percent, with the decline sharper for companies with fewer than 200 employees.

The Kaiser study found that a family of four could expect to spend $11,000 a year on health insurance premiums, about the same amount that a full-time minimum wage worker earns in a year. Co-payments and deductibles are also rising, putting more of the cost of health care directly onto workers.

Unless increases in the cost of insurance moderates or a new way is found to fund health care for low- and middle-income workers, Kaiser researchers worry that more and more people will be priced out of coverage. That’s not much of a leap in knowledge. We know it’s already happening. The days when workers could count on getting insurance from their employers are already gone for many; with yearly cost increases near or above double digits, the way about 160 million Americans purchase health care is at risk.

The result is easy to predict. The system of job-based health insurance will continue to limp along, becoming more expensive for employers and employees alike. Co-payments and deductibles will continue to increase, and more workers will drop coverage or become woefully underinsured. Eventually, if something isn’t done, the system will collapse under its own weight. Then what?