Poverty and Uninsured Report

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2011/09/poverty-and-uninsured-report

The Census is out with those poverty, income, and health insurance statistics that I previewed in yesterday's Reason column, and, as I predicted, the news is grim:

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that in 2010, median household income declined, the poverty rate increased and the percentage without health insurance coverage was not statistically different from the previous year.

Real median household income in the United States in 2010 was $49,445, a 2.3 percent decline from the 2009 median.

The nation's official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent, up from 14.3 percent in 2009 ─ the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate. There were 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010, up from 43.6 million in 2009 ─ the fourth consecutive annual increase and the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published.

The number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 49.0 million in 2009 to 49.9 million in 2010....Between 2009 and 2010, the percentage of people covered by private health insurance declined from 64.5 percent to 64.0 percent, while the percentage covered by government health insurance increased from 30.6 percent to 31.0 percent. The percentage covered by employment-based health insurance declined from 56.1 percent to 55.3 percent.

Again, as I noted in the Reason column, President Obama signed ObamaCare into law in March 2010 with a lot of hype about how the law's provisions preventing insurers from barring people with pre-existing conditions or dropping people's insurance once they got sick went into effect on day one. It's pretty remarkable that the result of the year with the first nine months of ObamaCare being in effect was 900,000 more Americans without health insurance. President Obama can argue the counterfactual, as he does with the stimulus and unemployment, that without ObamaCare there'd be even more uninsured.

Also, as I noted in the Reason column, 2010 was a year in which Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House.

by Editor  |  Sep 13, 2011 at 10:17 am Related Topics:  Health Care, President Obama receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list