The long road to universal health care coverage

The Census Bureau recently released a report entitled Income, Poverty and Health Insurance in the United States: 2005.   Highlights of the report relating to health insurance include:

• The number of people with health insurance coverage increased from 245.9 million in 2004 to 247.3 million in 2005.
• In 2005, 46.6 million people were without health insurance coverage, up from 45.3 million people in 2004.
• The percentage of people without health insurance coverage increased from 15.6 percent in 2004 to 15.9 percent in 2005.

The states continue to act as the laboratories for experimentation in this arena.  Massachusetts is wrestling with implementation of its universal health care plan (see discussion elsewhere on HealthBlawg); John McDonough notes Ohio’s step into the fray at A Healthy Blog; and now California has a single payor plan passed by the legislature, but facing near-certain veto (see UPI story here).