Who would have thought?

It looks like the federal government is doing a better job of holding down health care costs than the private sector.

Employers should expect to see their 2011 health care premiums to increase at their highest levels in five years, according to an analysis by Hewitt Associates.

The consulting firm projects an 8.8 percent average premium increase for employers, compared to 6.9 percent in 2010 and 6.0 percent in 2009.

Sometimes bad short-term news could turn into good long-term news.

Case in point is the report that employees paid 14 percent more for family health care coverage this year than they did last year.

When Allscripts and Eclipsys announced their $1.3 billion merger on Wednesday, they made it very clear they were motivated by President Obama's health care legislation and his plan to ratchet up spending on electronic health records.

Allscripts is a provider of clinical software and information for physicians while Eclipsys provides services for hospitals and clinicians. "By combining the leading physician-office and post-acute care solutions from Allscripts with Eclipsys's leading enterprise solutions for hospitals and health systems, the combined company will offer a single platform of clinical, financial, connectivity and information solutions," the companies stated in their press release.

The combined company's client base will include over 180,000 US physicians, 1,500 hospitals and nearly 10,000 nursing homes, hospices, home care and other post-acute organizations. As a result, the two companies believe they are in a great position to connect physicians, other care providers and patients in hospitals, physician practices, extended care facilities, or even in a patient's home.

The employer-sponsored health care system provides health insurance to more than 60 million people--but it does not exist in a vacuum. Employers are often reminded of this fact when their health care costs go up each year. Factored into that cost increase are premiums employers pay to hospitals to help those institutions provide care to the uninsured.

As more and more companies look to save money on heath care costs, a large number of them are targeting their former employees.

According to a recent survey conducted by Towers Watson, a stunning 77 percent said they believe health care reform will reduce the number of large employers offering employer-sponsored retiree health benefits.

A new study from Mercer tries to ascertain the costs to business of health care reform. One interesting consequence of the mandate could be new insurance designs that comply with the law and help employers avoid penalties.

On the whole, though, the survey shows that employers are worried about new taxes and penalties.

The percentage of employers offering health benefits has been dropping for years, mainly because small employers can't afford the premiums. And while health reform is supposed to reverse that trend, an analysis by federal actuaries predicts fewer workers will have insurance through an employer as a result of the new law. Still, that's not the whole story.

The number of people with employer insurance will total 164.5 million by 2019 compared to a predicted 165.9 million who would have been insured through an employer had the system not been changed. Employers currently provide 159 million people with health insurance, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

At the risk of seeming terribly politically incorrect, I highly recommend taking a look at this paper published today by the Economic Policy Institute, which argues that further government stimulus is necessary for the economy to recover.

Essentially, authors Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz argue that prospects for new hiring are so dismal because of productivity gains in recent years that it will take much higher GDP growth than anyone reasonably expects to bring unemployment down significantly anytime soon.