About a month ago, the Commonwealth Fund published the results of its biannual survey on the state of health insurance coverage in the United States. Good timing, given the recent uproar over the business conglomerates that dominate the sector and seem to be more concerned with maximizing investment returns than ensuring the health and wellbeing of their customers.

Despite the Commonwealth Fund’s mission—to “promote a high-performing, equitable health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society’s most vulnerable”—its agenda is decidedly nonpartisan. I recently talked to a doc from Physicians for a National Health Program who made a good case for abolishing for-profit insurers entirely.

Commonwealth doesn’t quite go there. Although the survey report says public options should be made available, the primary policy recommendations involve bolstering Medicaid, the federally funded public insurance program for low-income Americans (the incoming administration appears likely to do the opposite)—and protecting consumers from medical debt. (Ditto.) But “the survey findings show pretty clearly that commercial insurance is not enabling timely and affordable access to health care without fear of medical debt for millions of people,” one of the authors, Sara Collins, told me in an email.

Indeed, it’s hard to look at these six charts—five of which are derived from the Commonwealth report—and not conclude that something is rotten in Washington and on Wall Street. The Affordable Care Act, which Republican lawmakers very nearly repealed during the first Trump administration, has cut the number of uninsured Americans in half, to 26 million last year, or roughly 1 in 12 people. (This number will certainly rise if Congress fails to renew enhanced ACA premium subsidies put in place during the Biden administration, which are set to expire in 2025.)