The 2013 version of the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey -- Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) -- confirms the dramatic1 rise in the percentage of uninsured residents in Massachusetts. That's right in Maassachusetts, you know the poster-boy state where we have the universal health coverage that is the pride of the nation.
The above illustrations are from the latest Census Bureau SAHIE data release -- which can be found here and which I use because it comes with spiffy graphics. But the ASEC data which brings the data about Massachusetts' uninsured into 2012 -- but in a hard to comprehend Excel spreadsheet -- shows the same trend for 2011 to 2012 as SAHIE shows for 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 above.
Does this matter? Apparently it matters only to elite academics who are scrambling like mad in the last month to defend their flawed research concerning the now defunct and previously failed RomneyCare and their application of that research to the now apparently failing Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. For the rest of us, no one questions that the state of Massachusetts gave away free insurance or almost free insurance to 400,000 residents in 2007-2008 and that that giveaway did not matter one iota to the Massachusetts health care market.
1I am just playing the Wonkblog/Obama-administration game of misrepresenting statistics with adjectives like "dramatic." Still, clearly the number that everyone -- except those of us in Massachusetts -- seems to care about is heading north when it should be heading south.