By now you’re probably accustomed to your health care costs climbing each year. But brace yourself: 2010 is shaping up to be a doozie — a year that could shake up your opinion about how attractive the current employer-provided health care system really is..

When I reported a story for the November issue of MONEY about selecting 2010 health benefits, I was shocked by the expected rise in health care costs. And while I thought the forecasted increase was alarming, I didn't have enough space in the print edition to fully explore its roots and magnitude. So here's what I couldn't include the first time around:

Next year, according to human resources consultant Hewitt Associates, employees on average will see a whopping 10% jump in their premium, bringing their share of annual premium costs to $2,085. They’ll also see additional out- of-pocket costs — deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance, for example — climb 10%. Adding up all these expenditures, Hewitt says total health care costs next year will be $4,023 — triple where they were a decade ago.

Appropriately enough, this price shock comes as Congress is debating the largest health care overhaul our country has attempted in decades. More

Many workers unfortunate enough to get the ax in this recession at least had one thing working in their favor: subsidized health insurance. This past February Congress threw out a temporary life preserver for workers laid off between September 1, 2008, and December 31, 2009: For up to nine months, Uncle Sam covers 65% of the monthly premium that these newly unemployed people have to pay to stay on their company health care plan. Previously, if you stuck with your company benefits (under the federal program known as COBRA), you had to pay your share of the monthly premium, plus how much your employer covered. For singles, that totaled an average of $400 a month, according to Kaiser Family Foundation; for families, it came to $1,050.

Thanks to this new subsidy, 38% of unemployed workers are opting to remain on the company health plan, double the number that typically stick with it, according to a study from Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting firm.

But now that lifeline is running out. More

A year ago, if my channel surfing habits had led me to a documentary about the Great Depression, I probably would have kept my finger on the clicker. At that point it seemed no one knew for sure if our country was heading into another depression. I'm not sure I could have forced myself to watch what could have been a glimpse into how miserable life may be over the next year — or even a whole decade. Talk about a downer. (Sure enough, moviegoers flocked to comedies during those months of doom and gloom.)

Yet twelve months later, perhaps armed with a new confidence that our economy is crawling back to safety, viewers have another opportunity to gain a better understanding of the events that unfolded during the Depression. More