The Obama administration insists that it’s just “coincidental and unfortunate timing” that the Census Bureau is drastically overhauling its questionnaires so that it will be impossible to accurately gauge the effectiveness of ObamaCare.
Color us skeptical, coming as this does just months before a mid-term election in which health care is emerging as a deciding issue. After all, this is the same administration that in 2009 moved to blatantly politicize the Census Bureau by putting it under direct White House control.
As the Times reported, the Bureau’s annual survey of folks’ health-insurance status is generally seen as the most authoritative, and experts hoped to use it to determine just how many uninsured Americans have become insured under ObamaCare. But the questions are being so radically revamped earlier statistics won’t be comparable.
Granted, the move to change the questions long predates ObamaCare and was prompted by suspicion the old method was inaccurate. Officials said the old system provided “an inflated estimate of the uninsured” — the key rationale for implementing ObamaCare in the first place.
But that’s why the timing of the Census change looks politically calculated. Even a Census Bureau analysis determined that “ideally the redesign would have had at least a few years to gather baseline and trend data.” So what’s the rush?