[Hoot Gibson]

I am a federal employee and mine went up about 10%.

You are lucky. I have not sat down and try to get a handle on my increased cost but I worked as a contractor in Mississippi for a year and paid for all of my insurance costs except for $300/month. I suspect that my current employer-provided plan will end up costing me much more out of pocket than I paid as a contractor. The reason for my comment on federal employees is that Obama and the Democrats depend on a heavy majority of federal employees voting to keep them in office. They will hold the rate of increase down more for federal employees than for private sector employees.

What burns me up is that we will never really know the true cost increases because there are so many ways for employers and the federal government to stick their hands into our pockets. Taxes, wage cuts, benefit cuts, higher deductible insurance plans - the feds have a big bag of tricks when it comes to obscuring the cost of their blunders.