50 Million People Don't Have Health Insurance

The US Census Bureau released a preliminary report on Health Insurance coverage. Roughly 15% of Americans (mostly Hispanic) don't have health insurance.

The US Census also reported that over 7 million people lost health insurance from being unemployed.

In the 2008 American Community Survey (ACS), the United States Census Bureau asked the question:

"Is this person CURRENTLY covered by any of the following types of health insurance or health cover plans?"

a. Insurance through a current or former employer or union (of this person or another family member)
b. Insurance purchased directly from an insurance company (by this poerson or another family member)
c. Medicare, for people 65 and older, or people with certain disabilities
d. Medicaid, Medical Assistance, or any kind of government-assistance plan for those with low incomes or a disability
e. TRICARE or other military health care
f. VA (including those who have ever used or enrolled for VA health care)
g. Indian Health Service
h. Any other type of health insurance or health coverage plan - specify

The Big Picture About Health Insurance

There are, right now, 310,263,957 people living in the United States. According to the ACS survey, 84.9% of the people in this country have health insurance. The CPS ASEC and NHIS report similar data with 84.6% and 85.2% respectively.

So roughly 15% of Americans are uninsured. Looking closer at the data we can see that the bulk of the people that don't have health insurance are Hispanic/Latinos. All three surveys indicate that only 68% of Latinos don't have health insurance (see Table 6). 15% of 310,000,000 people is about 45 million Americans without health insurance. The US Census is reporting 50.7 million.

Is this too much? It depends. We don't know how many of those surveyed were illegal immigrants south of the border.