More Latinos in U.S. Join Ranks of the Poor, Census Says; New Figures Show Higher Poverty Due to Rising Medical, Work-related Costs

In stark new numbers issued by the U.S. Census Bureau, there are now roughly 49.7 million poor in the U.S. who are living in poverty-and three in ten of them are Latinos.

Latino poverty rates spiked by 28 percent after the bureau readjusted their poverty figures so they could take into account medical costs and work-related expenses such as increasing transportation costs.

"There are several important differences between the official and supplemental poverty measures," Kathleen Short, a U.S. Census Bureau economist and the report's author, told ABC News Univision in a statement. "For instance, the supplemental measure uses new poverty thresholds that represent a dollar amount spent on a basic set of goods adjusted to reflect geographic differences in housing costs. The official poverty thresholds are the same no matter where you live."

Using the previous measures, the official poverty numbers for the U.S. from 2009 to 2011 were 46.6 million living below the poverty line nationwide. But after the new readjustments are reconfigured, that number ballooned by roughly 3.1 million to 49.7 million.

Of those figures, the number of Hispanics living in poverty jumped from by 2.6 percent from 25.4 percent living in poverty in 2009 to 28.0 percent under the readjusted figures in 2011.

African-Americans saw their poverty levels drop from 27.8 percent under the 2009 official rate to 25.7 percent post-readjusted figures in 2011. Poverty climbed from 9.9 percent to 11 percent mmong non-Hispanic whites.

Experts theorize that there are several factors that could have led to the rise in poverty rates.

"We're seeing a very slow recovery, with increases in poverty among workers due to more new jobs which are low-wage," Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economist who specializes in poverty, told Fox News Latino. "As a whole, the safety net is holding many people up, while California is struggling more because it's relatively harder there to qualify for food stamps and other benefits."