Report: 1.4million fewer have health insurance coverage

WASHINGTON - An additional 1.3 million Americans slipped into poverty last year and another 1.4million went without health insurance, the government reported Thursday. It was the third year of bad news in both trends.

The new Census Bureau numbers also show that the annual income of middle-class Americans, which fell in 2001 and 2002, finally leveled off last year. Census analysts said the income of households at the center of the economic spectrum was $43,318 in 2003, a statistically meaningless $63 below the 2002 level.

But with job and wage growth earlier this year showing signs of weakening, that could prove cold comfort to millions of working Americans or to President Bush, who faces a tight re-election battle against Democratic Sen. John Kerry.

"For the third year in a row, the news was basically not good," said Ron Haskins, a former senior Republican congressional staffer now with the Brookings Institution in Washington. "It's reasonable to think income and poverty will improve some in 2004, but they didn't last year." Both political camps engaged in a furious effort to put their cast on the Census Bureau's latest portrait of Americans' economic circumstances.

Kerry seized on the new numbers as proof that the Bush administration's economic policies had failed. In a statement, the Democratic candidate ticked off the trends since 2000 - median household income down more than $1,500; an additional 5.2 million individuals without health insurance and another 4.3 million in poverty.

"While George Bush tries to convince America's families that we're turning the corner, slogans and empty rhetoric can't hide the real story," Kerry said.

The Bush campaign countered that the agency's income and poverty numbers painted an incomplete picture by not including the tax cuts championed by the president.

Bush made no mention of the figures in three campaign appearances Thursday in New Mexico. But campaign aides rushed out bulleted "talking points."

On poverty: "The poverty rate is still below the average rate of the 1980s and 1990s."

On health insurance: "The percentage of uninsured is still below its highest point during the Clinton administration."

In addition, senior Republicans, including Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, offered glass-half-full interpretations of the Census numbers. He noted that although the number of people without health insurance grew last year, the number with coverage also grew by almost 1 million.

In a twist that could prove embarrassing to free-market Republicans, Census figures show that the reason the ranks of the insured swelled was substantial growth in government-provided health coverage, especially through Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, which offset a third straight year of declines in the number covered by employer-provided insurance.

Overall, 35.9 million Americans lived in poverty in 2003, up from 34.6 million in 2002, according to the Census Bureau. The increase pushed up the poverty rate - the portion of the population in poverty - from 12.1 percent to 12.5 percent.

The poverty level for 2003 was an average of $9,393 for a one-member household and $18,810 for a four-member family.