2.6 million pushed into poverty in ’08

McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON — The first year of recession took a toll on household incomes, drove 2.6 million more people into poverty, and cost 1 million people their employer-provided health care, the government reported Thursday.

Real median household income fell 3.6 percent in 2008 to $50,303, while the number of people living in poverty rose by 2.6 million to a record 39.8 million, or 13.2 percent of the population, up from 12.5 percent in 2007, the Census Bureau said.

The poverty rate for children rose to 19 percent. More than half of the 8.1 million families living in poverty were headed by a woman with no spouse present.

Median incomes adjusted for inflation were the lowest since 1997 and are down 4.4 percent since peaking in 1999. Real median incomes had risen for three straight years before the drop-off in 2008. The decline in median incomes in 2008 was similar to that seen in the past two recessions, but less than in the years around the 1974 and 1982 recessions.

“The decrease in income and increase in poverty from 2007 to 2008 are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the effects of this recession on the living standards of Americans,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute. She projected that incomes would fall a total of 9.3 percent from 2007 through 2010.

If Shierholz’s forecast is right, the typical household will have gone 15 years without any increase in income.

In a finding sure to resonate with the debate on health-insurance reform, the government reported that the number of Americans without health insurance at any time during the year climbed by 800,000 to 46.3 million, or 15.4 percent of the population. The percentage of uninsured was unchanged from 2007 and has been essentially unchanged since 1991.

The number of people receiving employer-provided health care fell by 1 million to 176 million, while the number under government-funded health-care rose by 4.4 million to 87.4 million. About 25 million have private insurance not provided by an employer.

About 21 million people worked full-time but had no health insurance.

The number of children without health insurance fell to 7.3 million, the lowest since 1987, when the data were first collected. Fewer than 10 percent of children were uninsured, while 20 percent of adults under 65 were uninsured.

“The fact that this year’s numbers are not even higher can likely be attributed to the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program,” said Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

Nearly half of noncitizens were uninsured, accounting for about one-fifth of the total uninsured.

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