Sometime in the next few weeks, the Supreme Court is supposed to render its verdict on the legislation passed in 2010, affectionately known as Obamacare. How it will come down from on high, I have no idea, but the blogs and messages I receive as a financial advisor are all over the map.

While I’m interested in this personally and to some degree professionally, I realize that readers of my blog probably don’t give a damn, unless they are somehow directly impacted by the few provisions of the law that catch the most attention.

But if you are a member of the voting public, and you have an interest in how all this evolves, both politically and from the perspective of your wallet, here is something I found that helps.

It was written by a Joe Miller and appeared on a daily newsletter called BenefitsPro. They publish with a target audience of insurance agents, and individuals in corporate America whose job is to manage benefit programs for employees.

Over the last 10 plus years, the United States Economy has seen 27 percent inflation. This means that if you had $1.00 in the year 2002, you would need $1.27 to purchase the same thing in 2012. Over the same period of time, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, insurance premiums have increased by 114 percent. 27 percent vs. 114 percent.

This difference has been referred to as the health care affordability gap. This gap has caused businesses to examine different ways to offset some of the pain of the ever-increasing insurance burden. Organizations have increased employee contributions, raised deductibles, increased co-pays and chosen lower quality plans. Still, no matter what measures they take to lessen the impact, insurance premiums have increased 87 percent when adjusted for inflation (114 to 27 percent).

While the affordability gap has been drastic for businesses, the employee has actually taken a heavier burden of the health care cost increases. Over the same 10 year period, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average worker contribution has increased by 147 percent; an inflation adjusted increase of 120 percent.

What you should take away from this is that this isn’t just a problem for business. Employees, meaning “us”, need to know that we should care about this issue because like the inflated cost of gas for our cars, insurance costs are eating into our budget and our retirement money more than ever.

There are many factors contributing to increased health care costs. Some, such as an aging population are inevitable and irreversible. Other factors are controllable decisions that people make every day. These include choices such as maintaining a healthy weight, not smoking and making conscious decisions of how to “spend your health care dollar.”

Each of us need to realize there is a direct correlation between our health risks, the insurance claims they incur and the insurance premiums that are then offered by the health insurers. The problem with this is that many of us don’t have the information we need or the education to make the best decisions and impact these numbers. And we’re generally pretty lazy.

We should be encouraging our employers to provide education as to how to make smart choices with our health plans. Some are providing this education in conjunction with consumer-driven health options. Most employers though, are either not doing enough to educate their employees, or are providing information that is confusing or hard to use.

The second level of help that we as employees need are programs designed to maintain or improve our health. Everyone knows smoking and obesity are bad for you. If the information alone changed behavior, we’d have a perfectly healthy population.