Don’t freak out about the changes to the Census yet

An estimated 13.4 percent of Americans lacked health insurance coverage in 2013, new data from the Census bureau shows.

We don’t fully know whether that’s an increase or decrease from last year because, beginning this year, the Census has changed how it measures the number of people who lack coverage.

The change was controversial when it happened in April, as critics charged it would make it impossible to measure Obamacare’s impact. But government officials say its necessary exactly because of the health reform law: they needed better questions to more accurately understand who has coverage.

What that criticism missed: the Obama administration planned to use the new survey questions to collect data for 2013, the year prior to Obamacare’s health insurance expansion.

“We did this work before the Affordable Care Act went into effect and in this year, 2013, we do not have any impact yet of the Affordable Care Act,” one Census We will see that in the 2014 data.”

The Census Bureau reports the health insurance rate with a one-year delay; in September 2013, for example, the agency reported the percent of Americans without coverage in 2012. It will most likely report the uninsured rate for 2013 sometime this coming fall.

In other words: The survey will make it difficult to compare the uninsured rate for 2012, the last year for the old questions, and 2013, the first year for the new questions. But making the change now means that 2013 and 2014 – the year before and after Obamacare’s big programs started – are using the same question set.

Census officials told the Times that the changes will make the survey a more accurate measure of who actually has health insurance coverage. The new survey questions are expected to show a higher uninsured rate. In a test last year, they found that 10.6 percent of Americans said they did not have health insurance when using the new questions – compared to 12.5 percent when people were surveyed with the old ones.

Census officials did have at least some concerns about changing the measurement of the uninsured rate at this moment. In a memo obtained by the Times, it was described as “it is coincidental and unfortunate timing.”

“Ideally,” the same memo says, “the redesign would have had at least a few years to gather base line and trend data.”

It’s worth noting that the Census numbers are not the only measure of how many Americans are uninsured. Gallup, for instance, also surveys this question, and some wonks prefer their methods anyway: