Another crazy conservative conspiracy theory comes true and it is to hide the failure of Obamacare.
From Mediaite:
In 2009, in the earliest weeks of President Barack Obama‘s
administration, the White House made the controversial decision to take the
unprecedented step of moving the Census Bureau from control of the commerce
secretary over to the White House ahead of the decennial 2010 census.
“Requiring the Census director to report directly to White
House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is a shamefully transparent attempt by your
administration to politicize the Census Bureau and manipulate the 2010 Census,”
read a letter addressed to Obama authored by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA)
andPatrick McHenry (R-NC).
While Republican officeholders were the primary sources of
statements expressing concern over the move, some non-partisan analysts were
also unnerved by the move. “The last thing the census needs is for any
hard-bitten partisan (either a Karl Rove or a Rahm Emanuel) to manipulate these
critical numbers,” wrote University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato in an
email to Fox News at the time. “Partisans have a natural impulse to tilt the
playing field in their favor, and this has to be resisted.”
The White House dismissed the concerns of conservatives
which were, indeed, unfounded insofar as they related to the 2010 census. But
the fears of some that the Census Bureau could be corrupted by the imperatives
of the political operatives in the White House was today proven accurate.
According to a report in The New York Times, the Census
Bureau has been directed to change the wording of its questions relating to
health care coverage so that they can no longer be checked against the past
three decades of data. According to the nonpartisan analysts and census
officials The Timesspoke with, this change will make it nearly impossible to
accurately assess the effects of the Affordable Care Act has had on the number
of Americans who have health insurance.
The changes will, however, likely have the effect of showing
a reduction in the number of uninsured. This will not be the result of the
effects of the law. Rather, according to the Census Bureau’s chief of the
health statistics branch, the drop in uninsured is only going to be due to “the
questions and how they are asked.”
Policy analysts and columnists, who are not reflexively
friendly to conservative causes, called the debasement of a formerly neutral
agency to achieve a political end “insane” and “inexcusable.”
And, thus, another crazy conservative conspiracy theory is
proven to not be so crazy after all.
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