Cen­sus fig­ures due to be released next month will show an increase in the U.S. poverty rate. The num­bers are sure to throw a whole new spin on the health insur­ance debate in Wash­ing­ton, for both sides of the isle.

From this Asso­ci­ated Press arti­cle that we found at Ore­gon Live, writer Hope Yen inter­views a gov­ern­ment worker about the numbers.

Rebecca Blank, the Com­merce Department’s under­sec­re­tary of eco­nomic affairs, spoke to The Asso­ci­ated Press in advance of next month’s closely watched release of 2008 cen­sus data. Not­ing the fig­ures are not yet final, Blank said the num­bers will likely show a “sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant” increase in the poverty rate, to at least 12.7 per­cent. That would rep­re­sent a jump of more than 1.5 mil­lion poor peo­ple last year.

“There’s no ques­tion that 2008 eco­nom­i­cally was a much worse year than 2007,” she said Wednes­day. “The ques­tion is how much and how bad.”

The num­ber of Amer­i­cans with­out med­ical insur­ance is also expected to notably increase due largely to ris­ing unem­ploy­ment and the ero­sion of pri­vate cov­er­age paid for by employ­ers and indi­vid­u­als, but Blank declined to say by how much. In 2007, the num­ber of unin­sured fell by more than 1 mil­lion mostly because gov­ern­ment pro­grams such as Med­ic­aid for the poor picked up the slack.

The cen­sus fig­ures, set to be released Sept. 10, could have impor­tant ram­i­fi­ca­tions as Con­gress returns from its August recess to debate health reform, its cost, and the ways to pay for it. Repub­li­cans also have tra­di­tion­ally pointed to the intractable poverty rate as a sign that gov­ern­ment pro­grams do not work, a claim likely to be repeated often in light of the fed­eral eco­nomic stim­u­lus package.

In a 30-minute inter­view, Blank said the cen­sus fig­ures released next month could pos­si­bly under­state the actual num­ber of poor peo­ple, since the poverty rate is a lag­ging indi­ca­tor that tends to accel­er­ate over time. As a result, the 2008 data could prove to be the tip of the ice­berg, with more sig­nif­i­cant declines reflected in 2009 fig­ures released next year.

She esti­mated ear­lier this year that poverty could even­tu­ally hit roughly 14.8 per­cent or more if unem­ploy­ment reaches 10 per­cent as some ana­lysts predict-or nearly one out of every seven Americans.

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