With "Cover the Uninsured Week" underway, it's time to review Understanding the Uninsured and What to Do About Them (PDF), a publication of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, or CAHI. Among the points made in this report:]

- Though the number of the uninsured has increased with the rising of the population, the percentage of people without insurance has remained stable over the last 15 years, at 15 percent.

- State estimates of the uninsured are sometimes significantly lower than those developed by the U.S. Census Bureau. For Massachusetts, for example, the difference was 7 percent versus nearly 11 percent.

- The uninsured are not one mass of people who will be served by the same solution. Some people are without insurance when they go from one job to another; others face tax discrimination when they go to purchase insurance, and still others face a variety of other challenges.

- While income is one of the most important predictors of who has coverage and who does not, not all the uninsured are poor. According to the Census Bureau, over 8 percent have incomes above $75,000.

- Are the uninsured old and in frail health? Hardly. Over half (47 percent) of the uninsured are 18 to 34 years old, and 95 percent of those people who declined employer-provided insurance coverage reported themselves as being in good health.

While states enact any number of programs and laws to address the situation, they best use caution. Some states, in the rush to "do something," make things worse.