The new Census numbers are out and the news is...mixed. On the bright side, the percentage of Americans without health insurance went down, from 15.8% to 15.3%. But that's not because more Americans have been able to keep health coverage. It's because more Americans have fallen through the private insurance system and landed in the public sector. Private health insurance coverage also dropped over the same period, dipping mainly among those with employer health insurance, which has gone from covering 59.7% of Americans to 59.3%. So even through a period of sustained economic expansion and even amidst the generation of new and lower-cost private insurance options (health savings accounts, etc), the employer-based system has continued t unravel. But the public system picked up the slack. Government insurance expanded to cover almost 3 million more people in 2007, jumping from 27% to 27.8%. What 2007 saw, in other words, was the continued dissolution of the private, employer-run system, but a strong performance by the public safety net which actually did step into the breach. Moreover, the trends of this are clear: We can keep playing defense, watching the system unravel even in times of economic expansion and desperately trying to help the displaced, or we can actually, you know, fix it. Jon Cohn has much more.
