The uninsured problem isn’t as bad as you thought - it’s worse

The most-often-used measure of how many Americans are uninsured comes from the Census Bureau's annual survey.  The most recent Census report concluded that 45.7 million Americans were uninsured - a huge number, representing nearly one American in six.

Now, however, a new study by the consumer advocacy group Families USA shows that the problem is actually twice as big.

The Census survey counts people as uninsured if they were without health coverage for the whole calendar year.  But many people are uninsured for several months, although not the whole year.  Someone might even be uninsured from, say, March, 2007 to October, 2008, or a year and a half - but wouldn't count as uninsured in the Census numbers for either 2007 or 2008, since they had coverage for part of each year.

If you counted everyone who was without coverage for a month or more over 2007 and 2008, you'd get 86.7 million - or one American in three, according to the Families USA study, which draws on the same Census survey and two other federal government data sets.  Of those, three-quarters went without coverage for six months or more.

The data show uninsurance hitting all types of Americans:

• Four of five were from families where someone was employed - 69.7% full-time workers and another 9.5% part-timers.
• African Americans and Hispanics were more likely to be uninsured, but half of the uninsured were white.
• The poor were more likely to be uninsured, but 18.3 million uninsured were from families at four or more times the federal poverty level - that's nearly $85,000 a year for a family of four.

There are so many uninsured, the report said, because "job-based health insurance is becoming increasingly scarce" as employers cut back, because rising premiums mean "more and more working families are being priced out of job-based insurance" and because safety-net programs don't cover all the people who need coverage.