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Thursday, April 17, 2014

Census covering up Obamacare effects

 The whole of Obamacare has been one gigantic cover-up. From back room deals behind closed doors, to passing it in the dead of night on Christmas Eve, to the horrible roll-out, to fudging the number of sign-ups and how many have lost their insurance, to the “Affordable” part of the Affordable Care Act.
So when the Census is now changing their methodology and questionnaire to mask the effects Obamacare has on the population at large, who can be surprised? Obamacare, the Bait that keeps on Switching.
WASHINGTON — 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.
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.
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.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/us/politics/census-survey-revisions-mask-health-law-effects.html?_r=3&assetType=nyt_now&referrer=

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