Taking Note: The Birth of a Conspiracy Theory

If you spend enough time on the Internet you'll eventually encounter a conspiracy theory. If you watch closely enough, sometimes you can actually see one being born.

For years now some on the right have speculated that the Obama administration is trying to politicize the national census. Yesterday, Noah Rothman argued on Mediaite that the theory was proven correct by a New York Times article about changes in the way the Census Bureau plans to ask about health insurance coverage.

The idea is that the new questions will show a reduction in the number of uninsured people starting in 2014, which may make it seem as though the Affordable Care Act is working better than it really is. The change in questions will also produce a "break in trend" within the census surveys and thus make it impossible to statistically compare 2013 and 2014 with earlier years.

Therefore, the White House must have ordered this sinister change to promote President Obama's signature domestic initiative.

But the article that Mr. Rothman cites, by Robert Pear, doesn't support the theory. Mr. Pear reports that census statisticians had been trying to change the questions about health insurance for more than a decade (in other words, before Mr. Obama was president) because … wait for it … the old questions were not accurate:

"When asked about their insurance arrangements in the prior year, people tended to give answers about their coverage at the time of the interview — forgetting, for example, if they had Medicaid for a few months early in the prior year. People are continually moving on and off Medicaid rolls. The number of people who say in surveys that they have Medicaid coverage is almost always lower than the enrollment figures reported by federal and state agencies that administer the program."

Mr. Pear also explained that the new questions were designed to produce more precise information on respondents' coverage. "The new survey asks people if they have coverage through an exchange, if it has premiums and if the premiums are subsidized"— because consumers often conflate Medicaid with subsidized private insurance.

Heinous! An outrage!

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