In 1999, it cost about $5,800 to buy employer-provided family health insurance coverage. If premiums had increased at the same rate as inflation, that same policy today would cost $7,239.

Instead, it costs $13,375. That's an increase of 131 percent — more than five times the overall rate of inflation.

Companies don't provide health benefits out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it to attract the best workers and because healthy employees with healthy families are more productive.

But when insurance costs grow at five times the rate of inflation, it's worth wondering how much longer they can afford to do it. That question should send shivers down workers' spines.

Since the early 1990s, the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation has been surveying U.S. businesses about the cost of health benefits offered to employees. Its latest survey, released this week, demonstrates why health reform is so urgent.

Let's put premiums for family health insurance coverage into a human scale.

A person who worked full time at a minimum-wage job in Missouri would need his entire gross wages from January until the second week of November just to buy a policy — assuming he could get the group rate.

For about $3,000 less, he could buy a new car; a base model Hyundai Accent sells for $10,665.

Of course, that minimum-wage worker never would be offered health benefits at work. That's because employers pay about three-quarters of the premium for health insurance that they offer their workers.

That means the minimum-wage worker's company would be paying about $9,860 for his family's coverage, a figure equal to about two-thirds of his annual salary.

The cost of covering just that worker, excluding his family, would equal about what he would earn for working almost 17 weeks.

No wonder so few companies that employ mostly low-wage workers offer health benefits. The Kaiser survey found just 39 percent of companies with large numbers of low-wage workers offer health benefits.

Workers at very small companies have only a slightly better chance. About 46 percent of companies with nine or fewer workers provide health benefits.

The result is that millions of Americans have been priced out of the health insurance market.

About 46.3 million were uninsured in 2008. Current estimates based on the unemployment rate put that figure at about 50 million uninsured today.

Covering them is one of the key goals of health reform. But another is to shore up the current employment-based system of health insurance. The reform proposals would create a so-called insurance exchange — essentially a giant group market that would be open to small businesses, the uninsured and people who buy coverage on their own.

Propping up the current system is crucial to the 150 million-plus Americans who get coverage through their jobs. Because if health insurance premiums keep growing at a rate anything like their recent pace, many people who now get health insurance through their jobs would soon be uninsured.

Last year, consumer prices increased by 0.1 percent. Health insurance premiums jumped by 5 percent. That's unsustainable.

If premiums keep growing at the rate they have over the last five years, family coverage will cost more than $24,000 in 2019.

If they grow at the rate they have over the past 10 years — an average of 8.7 percent per year — family coverage would cost nearly $31,000 in 2019.

If that happens, it won't only be low-wage workers who are priced out of the health insurance market. Millions of middle-class Americans would find themselves uninsured, too.