Oh man, a whole new set of conspiracy theories is about to take flight:
The Census Bureau, the authoritative source of health insurance data for more than three decades, is changing its annual survey so thoroughly that it will be difficult to measure the effects of President Obama’s health care law in the next report, due this fall, census officials said.
….An internal Census Bureau document said that the new questionnaire included a “total revision to health insurance questions” and, in a test last year, produced lower estimates of the uninsured. Thus, officials said, it will be difficult to say
how much of any change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act and how much to the use of a new survey instrument.
“We are expecting much lower numbers just because of the questions and how they are asked,” said Brett J. O’Hara, chief of the health statistics branch at the Census Bureau. With the new questions, “it is likely that the Census Bureau will decide that there is a break in series for the health insurance estimates,” says another agency document describing the changes. This “break in trend” will complicate efforts to trace the impact of the Affordable Care Act, it said.
I admit that this sure seems like a bad time to suddenly decide we need a new methodology for counting the uninsured, even if it has been in the works for a while. But it doesn’t matter if it’s almost certainly bureaucratic inertia at work here, not political skullduggery. The Fox News set is going to have a field day with this. The feds are unskewing their own numbers! Probably on direct orders from the White House! I expect Darrell Issa to commence hearings next week.
Yeesh. Can’t we just delay these changes for a year or two? Even if the old numbers were inaccurate, it would still be nice to keep a stable baseline for comparison through 2015 or so.
