Have you heard? The number of uninsured people walking around took a dip last year. Must be because of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. What a success… waitaminute… did anybody actually look at these numbers?

So, everyone's all excited that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's official bean counters, the uninsured rate actually fell – by a whopping three-tenths of 1 percent. What? We're still looking at "statistically" the same number: 48 million still without coverage, according to the bureau. So we're going to spend more than $1 trillion over the next decade, based on numbers from the Cato Institute, to barely even move the needle on the uninsured population? Talk about a lousy ROI.

(In retrospect, maybe so many focused on this part of the report – which also took a look at poverty in this country, which has remained virtually unchanged since the 1990s – because it looked like a silver lining at the time. Funny, also, that this week has seen a bunch of health care-related numbers published, all of which are suspect.)