Stripping away the insulation.(health insurance costs )

Since the start of this year's open enrollment season, millions of working Americans have gotten the message: Health care has become very, very expensive.

For some it has been a shock, because what employees haven't previously noticed is the effect on their companies. The U.S. Labor Department's latest Employment Cost Index doesn't typically make the front page of the local newspaper (as it does in this month's EBN). But if it did, they would have read that employee benefit costs are increasing more than three times faster than prices in the overall economy.