The Census Bureau, the principal agency of the US federal statistical system, will make significant changes to its annual survey that will make it difficult to measure Obamacare’s effects. Internal Census documents report that the Current Population Survey, which is the questionnaire used during interviews with tens of thousands of households, will include a total revision to health insurance questions this fall. The changes will make the new findings incomparable to census data from the years before the health care law went into effect and will cause a break in continuous data, which means that it will be difficult to understand how many changes are attributable to the Affordable Care Act and how many to the new survey instruments. Officials say the changes are intended to improve the census survey’s accuracy. The new survey was partly conceived to reduce a kind of bias or confusion in the old survey. The old questionnaire asked consumers if they have had various types of coverage at any time in the prior year. The new survey asks if they use insurance at the time of the interview, then, tries to find out when that coverage started to be valid and during which months it has been in effect. Using this technique, census officials believe they will be able to reconstruct the history of coverage month by month for each person in a household. The goal is to create a monthly history of health coverage. Brett J. O’Hara, chief of the health statistics branch at the Census Bureau, said that lower numbers are expected because of the new questions and the way they are asked. During a test run last year, the revised questions yielded lower estimates of the uninsured population in the U.S. than the previous method did. In 2013, the standard questionnaire found that 12.5 percent of Americans were uninsured; using the new version, just 10.6 percent of Americans were without health coverage. The White House is always looking for evidence to show the benefits of the health law. The gLAWcal Team Wednesday, April 16, 2014 (Source: New York Times) This news has been realized by gLAWcal—Global Law Initiatives for Sustainable Development in collaboration with the University Institute of European Studies (IUSE) in Turin, Italy and the University of Piemonte Orientale, Novara, Italy which are both beneficiaries of the European Union Research Executive Agency IRSES Project “Liberalism in Between Europe And China” (LIBEAC) coordinated by Aix-Marseille University (CEPERC). This work has been realized in the framework of Workpackages 4, coordinated by University Institute of European Studies (IUSE) in Turin, Italy.