To: TimF who wrote (35888 ) 4/17/2014 10:57:19 AM From: FJB Respond to Politicizing the Census? Ed O'Keefe reported:Sen. Judd Gregg said today [Feb. 12] that his decision to withdraw from consideration for commerce secretary was due in part to his concern with the Obama administration's decision to have the next Census director report to senior White House staffers as well as the commerce secretary. The senator's withdrawal statement described the disagreement about the census as "irresolvable." He later backtracked somewhat, saying at a news conference that "the census was only a slight catalyzing issue. It was not a major issue." But as O'Keefe observed, "the issue has become a rallying cry of congressional Republicans."As the New York Times reports: 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.T he 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.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.
