The New York Times published a bombshell Tuesday when it reported that the Census Bureau would be dramatically transforming the way its conducts its surveys that will make it extremely difficult to conduct any authentic analysis of the effects of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise colloquially known as Obamacare.
The purpose of the modification is for the Census Bureau to improve the accuracy of the study, but the new questions are entirely different that the discoveries will not be equivalent to prior surveys – thousands of household interviews will be conducted across the United States this month.
According to internal documents obtained by the newspaper, they showed that the questionnaire will consist of a “total revision to health insurance questions.” For instance, in previous Census surveys, interviewees were asked if they had health insurance at any time in the previous year. The new version will ask if they have insurance at the time of the interview (February, March or April) and will use follow-up questions to conclude when the coverage initiated and what months they were employed.
Last year, the agency performed a test run with the revised questions and provided lowered estimates of the number of uninsured Americans than previous surveys did: 12.5 percent of Americans were uninsured last year, but utilizing the methodology of the new survey, it would be just over 10 percent.
“The recent changes to the Current Population Survey’s questions related to health insurance coverage is the culmination of 14 years of research and two national tests in 2010 and 2013 clearly showing the revised questions provide more precise measures of health insurance through improved respondent recall,” Census Bureau Director John Thompson said in a statement.
Several of the new questions were requested by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the White House Council of Economic Advisers. White House Office of Management and Budget approved the alterations – headed by Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who has been nominated to succeed Kathleen Sebelius as head of the HHS.
Officials argue that it will be harder for analysts to find out how much change – whether good or bad – in healthcare can be attributed to Obamacare. Census data has been the go-to source of health insurance data for more than 30 years.
“We are expecting much lower numbers just because of the questions and how they asked,” Brett J. O’Hara, chief of the health statistics branch at the Census Bureau, told the news outlet.
Republicans are jumping at this information and are claiming that the American people may now never truly understand how Obamacare is impacting the country, the healthcare system or the economy.
“If the administration truly wants to know how many people have insurance today because of the health law, it will swiftly reverse course,” said Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican Congressman and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman, in a statement. “Did the health law work to insure the uninsured? A simple check of a box could answer that question. Sadly, we may never know – and the administration seems just fine with that.”
Obamacare enrollment officially ended Tuesday and the White House announced that 7.5 million individuals signed up for the private exchanges since October. Experts say that the statistic is misleading because the Obama administration is refusing to confirm how many people have had their old policies cancelled and how many people have paid their first month’s premium.
With the mid-term elections coming up, the president’s new healthcare law will be one of the biggest topics on the campaign trail for incumbents and political hopefuls.
