I hadn't realized we were this far down the road to dictatorship.
"Census survey revisions mask health law effects" by Robert Pear | New York Times April 16, 2014
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.
OMG!
Once again, as we see with the waivers and what not, this gutted law (save for the tax penalty cash grab) is more about the ELECTORAL HEALTH of DEMOCRATS.
Looks like we will just have to vote on first impressions then.
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.
Using the IRS against one's political opponents is bad enough, but the politicization of the Census goes beyond even that. Add that to the list of impeachment charges.
Thus, officials said, it will be difficult to say how much of any change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act....
Never mind that it's not affordable, ladies.
“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....
In other words, it's devised like an agenda-pushing poll cited in my propaganda pre$$.
The White House reported that 7.5 million people signed up, but health policy analysts and politicians had been assuming that the Census Bureau would help answer those questions when it issued its report on income, poverty, and health insurance, based on the Current Population Survey. The annual report shows the number of people with various kinds of health insurance and the number of uninsured for the nation and for each state.
Several recent private polls, including one by the Gallup organization, suggest that the number of uninsured is declining, because of the Affordable Care Act and improvements in the economy.
Census officials and researchers have long expressed concerns about the old version of insurance questions in the Current Population Survey.
The questionnaire traditionally used by the Census Bureau provides an “inflated estimate of the uninsured” and is prone to “measurement errors,” said a working paper by statisticians and demographers at the agency....
Yeah, it was all a bullshit report they were using to make decisions all that time. No wonder the country and this government is so screwed up.
At least the looters got paid. And they won't be using the new numbers to say more people are covered, right? I mean that's the flip of this. New numbers expected to show decline, that's the point of the change. But if not....
The White House is always looking for evidence to show the benefits of the health law, which is an issue in many of this year’s midterm elections.
You see?
The Department of Health and Human Services and the White House Council of Economic Advisers requested several of the new questions, and the White House Office of Management and Budget approved the new questionnaire. But the decision to make fundamental changes in the survey was driven by technical experts at the Census Bureau.
They really expect us to believe political pressure wasn't important here, huh?
Then they are even more delusional and out-of-touch than I thought.
Or do they just not care about the reaction to the stench they shovel out?
It's just get it out there, right?
Mucky up the waters by whatever ways necessary?
--more--"
Sorry I'm such a bummer these days, dear readers, and not a lot more laughs like in the past. Maybe I should just take a pill and forget all the lies.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"A widespread push to educate patients has improved how they look after themselves. And a major effort to track the progress of patients and help steer the ones getting off track has started to have an effect."
Why would I believe that after the lie?
At least the bottom line for insurers will be $afe.
