The number of people without health insurance in the United States dropped substantially between 2013 and 2014 – from 41.8 million people to 33 million – according to a report released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau. It counts the income of all family members living in a household, but doesn’t count the income from nonmarried partners, house sharers or other nontraditional arrangements.
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Along with its headline poverty rate-14.8 percent-the Census reported that 10.5 million working Americans are in poverty and another 22.5 million workers have wages so low that they are on the edge of poverty. After deducting the medical expenses, the Census Bureau calculates that he lived on $9,500, which is $1,200 less than the $10,700 supplemental poverty threshold for a homeowner with a mortgage living alone in Louisville. T he state with the lowest percentage of people without health insurance was Massachusetts (3.3 percent), while the highest uninsured rate was for Texas (19.1 percent).
The findings largely reflect the coverage expansions engineered by the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement, which requires most Americans to have health insurance or pay a fine.
Income is back to where it was years ago, but precise comparisons are now hard because Census changed its methodology last year so it could provide a more detailed look at the sources of Americans’ income. And while that wasn’t a big change, Wilson says one change previous year was very striking.
However, the vaunted gender pay gap still exists in the latest study.
Females who worked full time, year-round had a median income of $39,621 in 2014, or 79 percent of the $50,383 that full-time male workers earned.
The census report also found that in 2014 women were still earning 79% of men’s wages. We can and must do better than this.
The income and poverty numbers held steady in 2014, despite there being 2.8 million more Americans who were working full-time, year-round.
“Each decade, it’s taken longer for the poor to recover from recession, for the poverty rate to start turning around after the official end of the recession”, said Arloc Sherman, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.
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“The Federal Reserve”, Greenstein added, “should take the new Census data into account in deciding this week whether to raise interest rates, which would slow the economic recovery and job creation”.
