How do you fight poverty? Look to ObamaCare.

A new estimate of the poverty rate from the Census Bureau has sparked a familiar round of hand-wringing from mainstream and conservative commentators. Poverty is unchanged for the fourth consecutive year, leading Republican budget maven Paul Ryan (Wis.) to argue that U.S. poverty programs should be overhauled. "Rather than just treating the symptoms of poverty, our goal must be to help people move from welfare into work and self-sufficiency," the congressman told The New York Times.

However, the Census data also included another important measurement: the percentage of the population without health insurance, which has sharply fallen because of ObamaCare. This points toward a far better approach. If we rely on market institutions alone, then a huge fraction of the population will inevitably be poor and lacking health insurance. Only with concerted action from the state can poverty or uninsurance be abolished.

So Paul Ryan wants to get poor people working and make them "self-sufficent." He expanded on this argument in a recent TEDx speech:

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The problem with this argument is that it could be applied equally well against working. Getting a job helps stop poverty by putting money into your wallet on a regular basis. So long as an anti-poverty program isn't just a one-off handout, then it will work against poverty just like a job will.

Stated this way, it's an obvious point, but this is actually a devastating blow to Ryan-style thinking. Consider Social Security, the largest anti-poverty program in the nation by far, and one that is never mentioned when Ryan is doing his poverty shtick. This is a program that, quite literally, fills up the wallets of retired people.

But, the objectors might object, those people are old! They deserve their benefits, because they can't work. A fair point, but the same is true of the vast majority of poor people. Over 80 percent of poor people are either children, students, disabled, elderly, or the involuntarily unemployed. These are people who can't work for one reason or another, and hence cannot get any market income.

Ryan always talks as though the vast majority of poor people are able-bodied adults who don't have jobs because they don't have enough education, skills, or work habits — implying that their poverty is in some sense their fault. There are such people, but they make up about 15 percent of the total poor — and over half of those people attribute their lack of work to taking care of their home or family.

So the absolute upper bound of what a Ryan-style poverty approach could achieve on poverty is a reduction of 10 to 20 percent, and that's if his proposed surveillance bureaucracy actually gets people into jobs, which it won't. (Under Bill Clinton's welfare reform, benefits hinged on work requirements, which ended up basically destroying the program.)

A far better approach would simply be to construct Social Security-style programs aimed at each vulnerable population — a $300 monthly child allowance, for instance, would instantly cut child poverty by half.

The concrete virtues of this approach are demonstrated in America's uninsurance rate. Due to ObamaCare finally getting up and running, the uninsurance rate fell from 13.3 percent in 2013 to 10.4 percent last year.

How did it achieve this? First, and most importantly, through a big expansion of Medicaid, a social insurance program. (Gains would have been even more impressive had it not been for the conservative states with sky-high uninsurance rates that have refused the expansion.) Secondly, it mandates that everyone who doesn't have insurance must buy it, and provides subsidies for those who can't afford coverage.

That's not as good as Medicare for everyone, and it still needs some big adjustments, but it's basically workable. Most importantly, it doesn't fuss about trying to funnel absolutely everything through the market income channel. Market institutions will provide security tolerably well for the top half of the income distribution, but if we're talking universal insurance or poverty, when the system can't provide full employment, simple government benefits work better.