Patients wait for their wristband number to be called at the Remote Area Medical clinic in Los Angeles, April 29, 2010. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
There's a slight silver lining in one part of the
very bad poverty news from the Census. While the number of uninsured Americans has increased to 49.9 million, the
percentage of uninsured has not gone up a statistically significant amount.
The report—"Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States"—found that 16.3 percent of Americans were uninsured in 2010. The uninsured rate for children also held steady at 9.8 percent, though children in poverty were more than 50 percent more likely to be uninsured than American children as a whole.
The Obama administration found some good news in this data. In a blog post, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius noted that the report found a 2.1 point increase in insurance coverage among 18- to 24-year-olds—with about 500,000 young adults gaining insurance.
Sebelius attributed the increase to the health reform law’s provision allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26.
This report, she wrote, “shows that the Affordable Care Act is working.”
That's certainly a bright spot for younger Americans, with unemployment in that age group double the national average, and one of the real successes of the ACA. And a welcome one, in this economy.