Leaving a Whole Lot of Americans Behind: Number of Uninsured Reaching Epidemic Proportions

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And the bad news keeps on coming. New census figures released yesterday show that 46.6 million Americans had no health insurance in 2005, 16%, or one in six people. That’s more than the estimated number of people living with HIV (an estimated 42.6 million), and we call that a pandemic.

Of those with insurance the percent covered by their employers fell to 59.5% from 59.8% a year earlier. This change may seem small but there are two things to remember: one, each tenth of a percent represents hundreds of thousands of people, and, two, these numbers have been on a steady decline since 2001 when:

-14.6% of Americans were uninsured (15.9% now).

-62.6% were covered by their employers (59.5% now).

The Census survey also found that Texas has the highest number of uninsured (24.6%) and Minnesota the lowest (8.7%), and that last year the number of uninsured children increased from 7.9 million to 8.3 million.

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“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

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