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Len Nichols, a health economist at the New America Foundation, was giving a talk in the Midwest recently when an employer asked him a question that went something like this: I can fight health-care costs by moving jobs overseas, but then who’s going to be able to buy my middle-class goods? As jobs disappear, so does access to affordable health insurance in many cases, and consumers grappling with less income and unstable coverage rightly pinch their pennies.

Nichols recounted this Catch 22-like story in a conference call Tuesday as he detailed a new study from the foundation. It describes how high health-care costs are putting U.S. employers at a significant competitive disadvantage compared with the health-care burden shouldered by other industrialized nations. The problem will get worse unless financing for health coverage starts to shift away from the employer-based model, Nichols said.

Employers are financing the costs partly out of profits, he said. “Fundamentally, they’re looking for relief, and that helps explain why they’re demanding some kind of reform in a serious way from the federal government.”

To be sure, workers do pay part of their employers’ higher health-care costs in lower wages, but that’s more of a long-term phenomenon than many experts have appreciated, Nichols said. “If employers could push this into wages they would, but every single year health-care costs grow faster than productivity,” wages and general inflation. Raising prices isn’t an option because countries such as China and India offer lower-price goods.

He figured if employers bore no burden and health-care costs just came out of workers’ wages, then why would employers continue to move jobs offshore, reduce health benefits’ generosity and increase employee cost-sharing? . . .