The rate of increase in health insurance premiums slowed slightly in 2004, according to a new survey, but health costs continue to rise five times faster than worker wages or general inflation.

Consumers are also paying a larger share of their own health bills, as employers pass costs along, found the survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Health Research and Educational Trust.

Since 2000, the average worker’s monthly premium has risen from $28 to $47, and the contribution for family coverage has risen from $135 to $222.

Those increases are a result of the rise in overall premium costs, not because employers are requiring workers to pay a larger share of the premium. For the first time in 2004, the average annual family premium for a preferred provider organization - the most popular type of health plan - topped $10,000.

“The cost of family health insurance is rapidly approaching the gross earnings of a full-time minimum wage worker,” said Kaiser Foundation President Drew Altman.

The persistent double-digit increases in premiums - 11.2 percent in 2004, compared with 13.9 percent in 2003 - is affecting both the ability of employers to offer coverage and workers to accept it.

The percentage of firms with fewer than 200 workers offering coverage has dropped from 68 percent in 2001 to 63 percent this year. “That translates into five million fewer jobs that offer health coverage than 3 years ago,” said Kaiser Vice President Gary Claxton.

And the fact that health premiums have risen so much faster than wages over the past several years has priced many workers out of the health insurance market, when they become unable to afford their share of the premiums. “That gap is where the pain comes from,” Altman said.

Overall out-of-pocket costs for workers have grown 60 percent in the last 4 years, he added.

A particularly worrisome trend, said Kate Sullivan Hare of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is the tendency of small firms to cut back on their contribution to family coverage. Instead, she said, firms are over-subsidizing coverage for individuals to keep them in the insurance pool, since many plans require that a minimum number of workers participate to keep the policy in place.

That trend, however, could be leading to what Health Research and Educational Trust President Mary Pittman called “the family gap,” in which a growing number of women and children may find themselves uninsured. “The indicators point to a persistent and long-term problem for which there is no quick fix,” she said.