Megan McArdle comments on the Obama administration’s conveniently timed revamp of insurance-data collection:
I’m speechless. Shocked. Stunned. Horrified. Befuddled. Aghast, appalled, thunderstruck, perplexed, baffled, bewildered and dumbfounded. It’s not that I am opposed to the changes: Everyone understands that the census reports probably overstate the true number of the uninsured, because the number they report is supposed to be “people who lacked insurance for the entire previous year,’ but people tend to answer with their insurance status right now.
But why, dear God, oh, why, would you change it in the one year in the entire history of the republic that it is most important for policy makers, researchers and voters to be able to compare the number of uninsured to those in prior years? The answers would seem to range from “total incompetence on the part of every level of this administration’ to something worse.
I’ll go with “something worse”.
4 Comments
Malfeasance and skullduggery plus the essence of scumbaggery.
I vote with Malcolm and BigHenry. Right out of the Soviet playbook.
I am a big Megan fan. If you go to the comments section, you will see that I posted numerous times under the sobriquet “ratiocination.” There is a thoughtful and intelligent conservative there (political economist) and we had a quite interesting conversation. I hope you have a chance to look at it. He makes the most cogent argument against Obamacare I have seen to date.
As for the latest right wing attack line: it’s nonsense. If the Census Bureau went to Obama and asked to refine the questions to yield more accurate and comprehensive data, and he said no, the Obama haters would vilify him for that too. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
So, being just your average idiot conservative, if folks answered this insurance coverage question incorrectly on the “gold standard” metric used (the Census figure), and the Obama administration knew this all along, then it stands to reason they lied about the uninsured intentionally to ram through their Affordable Health Care law. Those high “inflated” numbers helped them then. When those numbers proved problematic to their propaganda, they rushed to fix that incorrect data. The administration focused the attention on the numbers, not conservatives. Of course,that makes one an Obama-hater for stating the obvious. Yep, they refined the questions to yield more accurate and comprehensive data….. juxtaposed to, at the highest level, this administration, could not produce any numbers on enrollment, then the delays, then precipitously, they have all this amazing, detailed “accurate and comprehensive” data at their fingertips… as their deadline hit.