John Adams, the second president of the United States, once noted, “Facts are stubborn things.” Well, not in the Age of Obama, where “facts,” like the number of uninsured Americans, can be easily changed to suit the president and his agenda.
Last week the U.S. Census Bureau announced it will use a new way to count the uninsured. The Bureau concedes the new approach is almost guaranteed to produce lower uninsured numbers—at exactly the time that President Obama wants lower uninsured numbers. Coincidence?
The Washington Post quotes Census Bureau Director John H. Thompson as saying, “I can assure you, I have had no discussions of this with the White House or with anyone else in the administration.” But wasn’t that what former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman snidely told Congress, then later news reports showed his name on the White House visitors’ log 157 times?
To be sure, there has been a long-running debate over whether the Census Bureau overcounts the uninsured, so an effort to revise the system would be helpful. With any other administration it would be reasonable to give it the benefit of the doubt, but you cannot make that assumption when Obama is involved. Indeed, the administration may have tipped its hand early.
Recall that retiring Republican Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire had accepted an Obama offer to become secretary of the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau. Gregg later retracted his acceptance claiming the Obama administration planned to politicize the Census Bureau.
As the New York Times reported on Feb. 12, 2009, “The White House signaled last week that it would exert greater control over the Census Bureau, in part because of a concern among minority groups over Mr. Gregg’s leading the Commerce Department.”
The Census Bureau regularly conducts public surveys to estimate how many Americans have insurance coverage, what kind of coverage, and how many are uninsured. People who went the entire year without coverage are considered uninsured; those who had coverage for part or all of the year are considered insured.
Interviewers typically ask survey respondents if they had had coverage at any time during the previous year. But people can forget they had coverage at some point, or they may omit Medicaid, or they might have had a minimal-coverage policy and didn’t think it was real insurance.
In its new approach Census interviewers will ask respondents if they currently have coverage, and if the answer is yes, then they will ask more questions to get additional information.
The Census Bureau says that the uninsured number dropped by 2 percentage points, from 12.5 to 10.6 percent, when testing the new method. Something similar happened in Massachusetts. When the Bay State passed Romneycare, state officials decided to do their own survey of the state’s uninsured as a baseline. They came up with a figure about 3 percentage points lower than the Census number.
Now, more than ever, the country needs reliable data to know if Obamacare is reducing the number of uninsured. But Bureau officials claim that the new approach is so different that the uninsured numbers before and after the change will be incompatible.
But even if you think transitioning to a better survey is a good idea—and I do—why would you do it right after the Obamacare enrollment period ended? Can Bureau leadership really be that politically clueless?
American Enterprise Institute Resident Scholar Michael R. Strain, who used to work at the Census Bureau, sees bad timing in the announcement, but no conspiracy. He notes that researchers have been moving toward reforming the surveys for several years. And since there are other surveys besides the one being changed, there will be data to compare it to.
But that’s where he underestimates Obama. The president and his administration have been absolutely shameless in their misuse and abuse of statistics. And the media haven’t been much better in holding the administration accountable. You can never take any numbers spouted by the administration at face value.
Take Obama’s Thursday press conference claiming that 8 million people had signed up for Obamacare. All the reporters know by now that number doesn’t tell us how many actually paid their premiums, or how many of those previously had coverage, got it canceled, and so had to get new coverage.
Real Clear Politics’ Sean Trende in January analyzed the president’s claim that 4 million people had enrolled in Medicaid. But Trende’s detailed assessment put that number closer to 400,000—one-tenth of Obama’s claim.
Obamacare requires Medicare’s trustees to assume that the government will dramatically cut Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements for physicians and hospitals several years in the future. That required assumption cut, at least on paper, Medicare’s long-term unfunded liabilities by about $50 trillion.
Medicare’s Office of the Actuary thought those reimbursement assumptions were so unrealistic that the office released its own paper providing an “alternative scenario” to the trustees’ report.
The New York Post’s John Crudele ran a series of articles exposing how some Census Bureau employees were manipulating unemployment data in the months leading up to the 2012 election to help the president.
The politicization of what is supposed to be reliable, nonpartisan, government-sponsored economic research is one of the saddest legacies of the Obama administration, second only to the politicization of what is supposed to be nonpartisan agencies, like the IRS and the Justice Department. And the president has been repeatedly helped along the way by supposedly independent organizations whose numbers also don’t stand up to scrutiny.
While it’s possible the Census Bureau simply made a badly timed announcement, this administration has forfeited the benefit of the doubt. You have to assume Obama is manipulating the numbers to promote his agenda and career, because he does it so often.