Is it a problem that USA employers cover most of the employee healthcare costs?

Employers are not paying for healthcare. Workers are paying for their own healthcare through their labor; their employers are just doing the paperwork. Health benefits are part of worker compensation. The part that the employer pays directly is just a diversion from the employee's pay, which brings tax benefits to both the worker and the employer, but it is not a gift from the employer. And there is economic data to demonstrate that worker cash wages are lower when they receive part of their compensation as health insurance. Employers don't "give" workers anything. As for the impact of the two-stream insurance payment system, it probably does insulate workers from realizing how much they are paying for how little they get, and thus perpetuates the US's horribly overpriced insurance profit mechanisms. But simply knowing how little they're getting for the money wouldn't necessarily lead to a change in the system. For one thing, the economics of the US insurance system are widely publicized - people just don't pay attention. It's not like people don't know that healthcare is expensive - it has been a major political issue for decades. And we've just gone through a massive overhaul of the US healthcare payment system, and that overhaul was only possible by guaranteeing, as part of the law, that health insurance companies and their profit-taking had to be a part of the system. Actually removing the waste and unneeded interference of for-profit bureaucracies, as most industrialized countries have done, was explicitly banned as part of the reform process. Americans pay roughly twice as much per person for worse care, compared to most advanced nations, not because they don't know that it's expensive, but because the profit-taking insurance industry - which provides absolutely no actual health care whatsoever - has a political stranglehold on the legislators who literally guaranteed them their profits as part of the healthcare law.

A free market solution probably can't function in the context of health care at all, for multiple reasons, including lack of actual choice and inability of consumers to become reasonably informed about the product. That's why the rest of the developed world tends towards some form of "health care for everyone, paid for by everyone," which appears to produce better outcomes at lower cost.

Intuitively the comment implicit in your question makes sense.  I (perhaps falsely) remember a chart presented by a senior Social Security/Medicare actuary at a Mid-Atantic Actuarial Club meeting several years ago that showed a sharp upward discontinuity in the rate of increase in health care costs as employer-provided coverage really took off.  Alas, I cannot find that on the web. However, a 2008 CBO report summarized studies indicating that the growth in third party payment of health care costs accounted for only 10%-13%  of the growth in costs.  See text on page 1 and Table 1 on page 6. http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/89xx/doc8948/01-31-healthtestimony.pdf You can probably find something to support either position.

What fuels the problem is the tax loophole that favors employer sponsored healthcare insurance and punishes employees that purchase their own healthcare insurance.   This destroys jobs since individuals are trapped in their large company jobs just to get affordable healthcare.  This directly causes countless thousands of small companies from forming particularly in silicon valley because no one can survive without healthcare insurance.  It is too expensive to purchase as an individual on the private market, just another free market failure. All these free market zealots fail repeatedly fail to acknowledge how employer based healthcare destroys jobs and prevents economic innovation.  It amputates the invisible hand of the free market.  It heavily favors large monopolistic corporations.  It is no surprise that these corporations want every advantage they can get.   I have had many personal first hand examples of this working with venture capitalists and small startups.   The tax code is horribly asymmetrical.   The employer tax break for all health insurance costs is at 100%.  As a W2 employee the tax break for health insurance is limited to what exceeds 10% of your total combined income.  This means the net tax deduction to the private individual is either minimal or zero. So the employer tax break is immense in comparison, they pay maybe 50 cents on the dollar.  The employer would have to give each employee a massive raise if the employee paid for their own health insurance on the private market.  So much for that free market nonsense. If one buys health insurance like I do in the private market then one is dismayed at all these employees that have employer based health insurance that are economically clueless with respect to their rising health care costs.  They simply just do not appreciate the rise in health insurance costs.  These people are typically against the ACA because they are protected by these employer based healthcare tax loopholes.  The irony is the ACA affects the private health insurance market participants not them.  Why do they think they have a stake in making the private health insurance market worse when they know nothing about it?   Ending employer based health insurance will place everyone in society on equal footing.  Maybe then we can have solution for all.  Currently we just have tax loophole winners and private individual losers.