At a news conference Wednesday Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the C.D.C., said both “adults and kids lost private coverage over the past decade,” much of that due to worsening economic conditions.
Nine percent of adults lost private insurance this year, and public insurance picked up just 5 percent of them, the CDC said. Frieden said 22 percent of adults aged 18 to 64 are uninsured.
The CDC analyzed data from the National Health Interview Survey or NHIS for 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 and the first quarter of 2010 for its report.
One of the many discoveries of this data analysis was the shifting makeup of the uninsured population of America.
"The first myth is that it's only the poor who are uninsured," Frieden said. "In fact, half of the uninsured are over the poverty level and one in three adults under 65 in the middle income range -- defined arbitrarily here between $44,000 and $65,000 a year for a family of four -- were uninsured at some point in the year."