The economic effects of the Great Recession on American households and families are stark in the latest data on income, poverty and health insurance released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.

As unemployment rose in 2010, poverty also increased to an all-time high, while median income and the number of people with health insurance coverage declined.

The number of people in poverty in the nation rose 2.6 million from 2009 to reach 46.2 million last year. That’s the fourth straight annual increase, and the highest level recorded in the 52 years that poverty levels have been compiled and published.

Median household income, meanwhile, fell 2.3 percent from 2009 to $49,445.

And the number of working-age people without health insurance rose to 49.1 million in 2010, up about three-quarters of a million people from the previous year.

The data are part of Census Bureau’s annual Current Population Series that is used to set national benchmarks on the economy.

To no one’s surprise, the news from the first year after the recession officially ended is not good.

“We had over 600,000 fewer payroll jobs in 2010 than we had 2009,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit think tank. “The unemployment rate rose from 9.3 percent to 9.6 percent. And the share of unemployed who had been unemployed long-term rose from 31.2 percent to 43.3 percent — a huge jump.

“So all of this deterioration in the labor market caused incomes to drop, poverty to rise and people to lose their health insurance.”

The numbers for states in the data release are less conclusive because of margins of error. Using two-year averages, however, Ohio’s median household income decreased significantly from $49,579 in 2007-2008 to $46,364 in 2009-2010, a decrease over the four-year period of $3,215 or 6.5 percent. The poverty rate for Ohio increased over the same period to reach 14.3 percent, but the 1.1 percentage-point rise was not outside the survey’s margin of error.

The percent of Ohioans without health insurance coverage, however, increased significantly from 11.2 percent to 13.7 percent. That left an estimated 1.5 million Buckeyes without health care coverage last year.

There were a few bright spots in the numbers, however.

While the percent of uninsured rose for most age ranges below 65 (when most Americans are eligible for Medicare), the numbers actually decreased by 2.0 percentage points for young adults, aged 18 to 24, the Census Bureau found. Elise Gould, an Economic Policy Institute economist who specializes in employer-based health care coverage, credits national health care reform, which allows young adults up to age 26 to be carried on their parents’ health insurance.

“This group has had the lowest rates of employer-sponsored coverage of anybody,” Gould said. “But you see in the last year that their uninsured rates actually fell a significant 2.0 percentage points. So while the number of uninsured under 65 rose by over three-quarters of a million, the number in the young adult category fell by a half million.”

In addition, the Census Bureau found, poverty would have been much worse without unemployment insurance and Social Security. In 2010, 3.2 million more people would have been in poverty without unemployment insurance benefits, and more than 20 million more would have been in poverty without Social Security.

Some of the most worrisome figures, however, were the increasing numbers of the poor — especially poor children.

The number of poor children nationally grew by almost 1 million in 2010 from the previous year, the Census Bureau found. The poverty threshold for a family of four is now $22,113. About 22 percent of all children under 18 were in poverty in 2010.

“That mean that between one in four and one in five kids were in poverty in 2010,” Gould said.

In addition, almost 6.7 percent of all people and 9.9 percent of kids were living in what demographers call deep poverty — that is, living in households with incomes of less than half the poverty threshold.

“That’s about one in 10 kids living in families with less than about $11,000 a year,” Gould said. “I think that’s an astonishing number.”