ADVERTISEMENT

Census Survey Revisions Will Hide Effects of Obamacare

AP

The Census Bureau is changing the way it conducts its annual survey on health coverage in a way that will make it nearly impossible to measure the impact of Obamacare.

Hotair.com explains:

As it turns out, the change the Bureau is making all but guarantees that the number of uninsured next year, post-ObamaCare, will be lower than than the number last year, pre-ObamaCare. This drug will work, even if the feds have to tweak how success is measured to ensure it. […]

They’ve been asking people whether they’ve had any health insurance over the past year. Supposedly, that produces a lot of false negatives from lower-income people who’ve forgotten that they were on Medicaid for a time before leaving the rolls. By changing the questions and following up later, they’re going to try to help people remember better by reconstructing a timeline with them for the past 12 months. All of which is fine—but why do it now? Logically, in the interest of preserving a clear comparison of America before and after a massive overhaul of the health-insurance industry, you’d want to hold all variables in a survey like this constant between 2013 and 2014. Unless, that is, the goal here is producing rosier numbers by any means necessary.

An internal Census Bureau paper said that "it is coincidental and unfortunate timing" that the survey was overhauled just as Obamacare took effect.