Losing Ground

By Chris Anderson | October 4, 2011 | 2:09 PM

Latest U.S. Census shows ranks of uninsured grew to 49.9 million

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WASHINGTON – First the bad news: a new U.S. Census report showed that the uninsured population grew to 49.9 million in 2010, an increase of 900,000 from 2009. The good news? Given the sluggish post-recession economy and a stubbornly high unemployment rate, the increase could have been much bigger.

“We didn’t know exactly what to expect with this report because of the recession and slow recovery,” said Devon Herrick, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis. “There was a feeling, however, that the increase would be much worse than it was.”

Timothy McBride, professor and associate dean for public health of the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, said: “The one thing that is striking about these numbers is that the rate of poverty went way up, but the rate of uninsurance didn’t go up nearly as much.”

The only other bright spot were the figures showing that one group – young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 – increased the number of insured to 72.8 percent, up from 70.7 percent in 2009.

Administration officials jumped on this finding, noting that one of the first provisions of health reform to take affect was one allowing adult children under the age of 26 to stay on their parent’s health insurance plans and the numbers were proof positive the policy is working.

"We expect even more will gain coverage in 2011 when the policy is fully phased in," said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a post on healthcare.gov responding to the census findings.

But aside from that, there were few surprises in the uninsured numbers for 2010. McBride noted that virtually no matter how you sliced it, the trend of increasing numbers of uninsured continued.

For instance, the percentage of people covered by any kind of private insurance has steadily declined over the past decade and in 2010 dropped by another half a percentage point to 64 percent. Likewise, 2010 saw a drop in the percentage of people who received health insurance through their employer to 55.3 percent in 2010 from 56.1 percent last year.

One common thread for those now going without health insurance was employment status.

“When you dig down into the numbers, you see there was an increase of 1 million uninsured among people who said they had not worked in the last year,” noted McBride. “That correlates almost directly to the (total) increase from last year.”

Still, there was some hope that even the tepid economic recovery in 2010 would have provided the impetus to reverse the trend.

"With the economy improving, we should have seen an improvement in the uninsured rates, but we didn’t see that, because the unemployment rate didn’t change," said Paul Fronstin, director of health research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Herrick, though, noted that when looking at historical census data in the year following the recessions in 2000-2001 and 1990-1991, the uninsured rate tended to peak about 18 months after the end of each recession, so this very slight increase is in line with what has happened in the past.

On a state-by-state basis, Texas and New Mexico showed the highest rates of uninsured citizens – 24.6 percent and 21.1 percent, respectively – while Massachusetts, one of only two states to require people to buy health insurance, was the lowest at just 5.6 percent of it population.

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Losing Ground

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