The government, a.k.a. the American taxpayer, is paying more for health care in the United States than may be readily apparent.

The U.S. Census Bureau has reported that 61.2 percent of Americans have job-related health insurance with 25.9 percent of the population covered by the government. But according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine, those figures may be closer than they appear.

Olveen Carrasquillo of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York puts the numbers at 43.1 percent funded by the private sector and 34.2 percent being taken care of by Uncle Sam, with 7.1 percent of Americans buying their own insurance and 15.6 percent being uninsured.

Carrasquillo claims that the Census Bureau counts most government workers as privately insured when the bill is actually funded through tax revenue; also, Carrasquillo said, some who get both federal and private insurance are counted as only being privately insured.