The numbers are rolling in, state by state. Oklahoma: 31%. Vermont: 8.3%. In New York, the figure is 13.5%; in Illinois it’s 23% and in New Mexico it’s a whopping 51%.

Insurance companies are asking state regulators to approve hefty average increases in the premiums Americans must pay for their health insurance, starting in January.

In most cases, these rate increases are far larger than those that were sought for 2015, the second year of life for the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. And the icing on the cake? The companies are hitting us as we struggle to cope with the impact of several years in which, if we have been lucky enough to have jobs at all, our earnings have grown at only about the rate of inflation.

Of course, there are crucial products or services whose prices never seem to bear a relationship to what is going on with the broader economy. Boom or recession, the price of college tuition or healthcare only climbs – and at a rate that always seems to exceed the rate of inflation by at least a factor of two.

There’s nothing new about that, as any company benefits manager will tell you – grumpily.

“Employers deal with it by swallowing the costs and passing some of the higher prices that insurers charge them on to their workers through higher premiums or by making benefits less robust,” said Dan Mendelson, chief executive of Avelere Health, a healthcare advisory company based in Washington DC.

That trend showed its ugliest side early last year, when AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong blamed unexpectedly higher healthcare costs, due to the birth to two employees of “distressed babies”, for his decision to cut retirement benefits for the entire company.

The outrage – and the fact that AOL clearly had ample profits to absorb the impact of the estimated $2m cost of the distressed babies – caused Armstrong to reverse his decision.

(As a side note, the mother of one of those “distressed babies”, novelist Deanna Fei, will have the last word: her memoir of her pregnancy, the birth of her daughter, and Armstrong’s tone-deaf pronouncements will hit bookstores this week.)

But AOL is far from the only company shifting more of the cost of healthcare to employees with every year that passes, to the extent that I now have at least one friend who says he could do better buying an Obamacare insurance policy on a state exchange than paying the premiums for his company policy.

And then there are those of us who have no choice in the matter: we now are legally required to purchase health insurance policies on the open market, sometimes from for-profit enterprises – and the cost of those insurance policies is going up.

I’m one of the lucky ones, I realize: in Rhode Island, Blue Cross Blue Shield is seeking an average rate increase of only about 11%, and my insurance policy will still be far more affordable than anything I would have been able to purchase in a pre-Obamacare world.

But it seems that other insurers, or Blue Cross Blue Shield doing business in other states, have done a far worse job of trying to figure out just who would be buying these Obamacare policies, based on the incomplete data they had at their disposal. That means they have been mis-pricing the policies for the last two years – and losing money on them.

If an insurance company can go to the state insurance commissioner and prove it paid out more in claims in the last year than it collected in premiums for the plan for which it is now seeking to charge higher rates, well, the odds are pretty good that the request will fall on receptive ears. And no, it doesn’t matter if a company’s other insurance business lines were profitable, says Mendelson: it’s the policy’s specific risk pool that counts.

“They’ve had to guess about that risk pool and a lot of them guessed wrong,” he said.

There are those who argue that the big rate increases we are likely to see this year a) won’t be as big as we fear and b) will prove to be a transitory phenomenon.

I’m ready to agree – to some extent – with the first point. The second, however, strikes me as being the product of some wishful thinking.

First things first. While the magnitude of the requested rate increases in some states have grabbed headlines, overall, the average premium rate increase requested is 12%, according to a survey by HealthPocket, a health insurance research and technology firm. That is still well above the rate of inflation, and higher than last year’s increases, but “the average American” – if there is such an individual – won’t be paying 40% more.

The more generous your plan is with its benefits, the more likely you are to face a higher rate increase, HealthPocket found. Insurers have requested that regulators approve average premium increases of 14% and 16% for silver and gold plans respectively. These plans have smaller deductibles and more generous benefits, meaning that their policyholders have to pay a smaller share of their healthcare costs out of their own pockets.

Insurers are seeking smaller rate hikes (averaging 9%) for their bronze plans, which have less plentiful benefits and higher deductibles. That means that consumers who want to shield themselves from the full impact of the rate hikes could move from a gold or a silver to a bronze plan, at least until the dust settles.

But will it? That’s a matter for debate. Mendelson believes the market will become “more stable” as more and more of the uninsured pick up policies, and it becomes easier for insurance companies to understand what the risks are in the various pools of policyholders, and thus to become better at keeping price increases stable.

Still, even Mendelson acknowledges that healthcare costs remain a wild card. With new drugs and therapies making their way on to the market every month, and scientific breakthroughs promising more to come, how will the costs of such innovations affect the cost of delivering health care – and, in turn, affect the cost of health insurance?

Consider Tecfidera, a new drug for multiple sclerosis, that can cost upwards of $60,000 a year to provide. It helps patients, but if insurers find themselves with a lot of new MS patients in their risk pool, the rest of us will find ourselves paying higher premiums. New drugs to treat hepatitis C are being blamed for the current run-up in premiums.

There is no reason to suppose that anything will stop this pattern: pharmaceutical and biotech research won’t halt and patients certainly won’t stop requesting new treatments as they become available.

Odds are that insurers will look for new ways to abide by the letter of the law, which stipulates that they cannot turn anyone away and cannot charge a sick policyholder more because of their illness. That could mean that you’ll see more efforts to limit the number of doctors you can see under your policy, and certainly will see a lot of debate over just what medications or therapies they will be willing to pay for.

Right now, there are so many moving parts that it’s almost impossible to figure out what could hurt or help us. Take the current wave of mergers amongst the health insurance industry, for instance.

On one hand, it could well leave consumers with fewer insurance plan options to pick from during open enrollment season – and at the end of the day, walking away from a too-costly plan remains our most powerful weapon.

But there is at least a case to be made that bigger providers could use their own clout to haggle with providers – hospitals and physician networks – to drive down the costs of everything from surgical procedures to, yes, those costly drugs.

At least the supreme court’s decision upholding the subsidies that make Obamacare policies affordable for about 80% of Americans who buy them removes one large source of uncertainty. But as premiums rise, the cost of those subsidies to the government will rise, too. And how long can that endure?

Ultimately, we’re all guinea pigs in a large, ambitious economic experiment. We can devote lots of time to researching the plans we’re offered, changing constantly and even switching our physicians in efforts to contain our costs.

But there is no guarantee we’ll emerge happier or even healthier – regardless of how much we fork over in insurance premiums.