The Dot Com Bust was mainly a crash in the market, and not so much a crash in the job market. Although there were significant losses of jobs in the IT sector, this hardly constituted even 500,000 jobs nationwide. As evident in this article from the SF Gate about Silicon Valley, (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2001/06/09/MN228809.DTL) the unemployment rate had almost a trivial at most increase. Also, many of the startups lacked insurance plans at the time for their employees.
Then you must add in the fact of the rise in illegal aliens in that time as well, and without new census data, one could logically come to the conclusion that there are less than the 6,000,000 American’s that are in need of insurance today, even with the rising unemployment.

The US Census is only performed once every 10 years, making it almost useless for ’statistical’ purposes such as this. There were a lot more affluent 20-somethings making 50k+ a year in 2000 than there are now, to be certain. I wouldn’t be surprised if a very large percentage of those 8 million people were ridding the dotcom bubble to the top (at one level of the schemes or another). And it -was- an entirely different economy then, as well.

That said, you make good conclusions even without the “correct” data. My personal opinion is that there need to be several major changes to insurance, all other things withstanding:

* At the very least, a person should be able to pick-and-chose which health policy benefits they need – not a buffet, but a menu. I do not want to supplement a 50-year-old tub of lard and their fast food addiction with my health policy. I am young and would like to buy what I need (just as I would expect to have to buy *whatever* plan if it were necessary for me to have anticoagulants and blood pressure pills at 50).

* And if we’re not going to get that granular, at least me to pick between “general” health insurance and “emergency” health insurance. I want the emergency coverage as a single-income-household earner in the event that something happens to me short of death (so that I might recover and continue to provide for my family).

* The AMA and the entrenched medical establishment needs to be dismantled from unconstitutional legal protection. They have been institutionalized into the state through various protectionist laws and kick-backs of one sort or another, to the point where people have more faith in medicine than pretty much anything else in this country (even more so than God, for those who are religious). It’s sickening.