Megan McArdle:
For several months now, whenever the topic of enrollment in the Affordable Care Act came up, I’ve been saying that it was too soon to tell its ultimate effects. We don’t know how many people have paid for their new insurance policies, or how many of those who bought policies were previously uninsured. For that, I said, we will have to wait for Census Bureau data, which offer the best assessment of the insurance status of the whole population. Other surveys are available, but the samples are smaller, so they’re not as good; the census is the gold standard. Unfortunately, as I invariably noted, these data won’t be available until 2015.
I stand corrected: These data won’t be available at all. Ever.
No, I’m not kidding. I wish I was. The New York Times reports that the Barack Obama administration has changed the survey so that we cannot directly compare the numbers on the uninsured over time.
The changes are intended to improve the accuracy of the survey, being conducted this month in interviews with tens of thousands of households around the country. But the new questions are so different that the findings will not be comparable, the 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.
I’m speechless. Shocked. Stunned. Horrified. Befuddled. Aghast, appalled, thunderstruck, perplexed, baffled, bewildered and dumbfounded. It’s not that I am opposed to the changes: Everyone understands that the census reports probably overstate the true number of the uninsured, because the number they report is supposed to be “people who lacked insurance for the entire previous year,” but people tend to answer with their insurance status right now.
But why, dear God, oh, why, would you change it in the one year in the entire history of the republic that it is most important for policy makers, researchers and voters to be able to compare the number of uninsured to those in prior years? The answers would seem to range from “total incompetence on the part of every level of this administration” to something worse.
Yes, that’s right, I said “every level.” Because guess who was involved in this decision, besides the wonks at Census?
Who expected the BHO regime to play fair?
IMO: it’s a combination of incompetence and underhanded propagandizing, as is the norm for crooked politicians.
Is the Pope Catholic?
Does it get dark at night?
Does the Sun come up in the East?
Come on.
If the regime can’t cook the books, there won’t be any books.
It reminds me of what happened to employment. All of a sudden folks who wanted a job were no longer unemployed, because their eligiblity for unemployment had expired. Huh?
Once upon a time, if you wanted to work and hadn’t found a job, you were unemployed.
Now there are elaborate criteria which have to be satisfied. So just because fewer people work, there are no unemployed? This passes for logic?
You just can’t trust ANY information from this regime. Other than their incessant demands for contributions to re-elect themselves, of course. Those demands are real.
It seems to me that pollsters and actuarial numbers crunchers within the insurance industry might make the US Census game irrelevant.
After all those have been the sources of real numbers up until now (since the roll out.)
Seems to me that Pharmaceuticals’ organizations have also been incredibly accurate in their numbers as opposed to Obama’s in past studies.
Obama’s ploy can be sidestepped.
I hope it gets sidestepped.
@mathman:
When the government counts “the current workforce”, they add in those collecting unemployment even though they are not working, but those who fall off unemployment because their benefits ran out are not counted are no longer considered as existing in the job marketplace. The purpose is to confuse the people and make them think that the employment situation is far better than it is. It’s all a disingenuous political new math which both parties support.
I’ve posted updates of the real numbers here on FA many times. At last look, the actual number of unemployed workers (using the government’s own labor statistics which counts only those considered of work force age, which does not count illegal immigrants or those of social security retirement age.) individuals “eligible to work” yet unemployed is at 43%+. (Note that this would include stay at home spouses, which is now a luxury few can afford.)