There are a lot of people in the health care pundit business who are screaming about this piece of news right now: “The Census Bureau, the authoritative source of health insurance data for more than three decades, is changing its annual survey so thoroughly that it will be difficult to measure the effects of President Obama’s health care law in the next report, due this fall, census officials said.” Basically, the questions have been changed in a fashion that supposedly will make the census data collected more accurate, but will almost certainly bring in a result where the percentage of uninsured will be ‘officially’ deemed to be lower.  As the New York Times (rather glumly*) had ‘officials’ put it: “it will be difficult to say how much of any change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act and how much to the use of a new survey instrument.”

Funny how that works.

Anyway, if you’re one of those aforementioned health care pundits, and you’re normally a supporter of the administration, do the rest of us a favor and shut up. Back in 2009 it was clear that Barack Obama considered it to be a good idea to have partisan control over the Census Bureau: and the GOP’s objections (H/T: @KristinaRibali) were dismissed then by a lot of the same people who are freaking out now about how this administration has decided to politicize their favorite policy arena, too.  This is the operating paradigm that the Left wanted, in other words: they shouldn’t complain when the Obama administration decides to implement it across the board. Or at least they shouldn’t whine about it too much.  It’s unseemly.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*You know it’s bad when the NYT can’t gild a Democratic lily.

PS: The Obama administration is only trying to fool one group of people, here: his base supporters.  Everybody else has figured out already that this is all just a political game. And I’d like to note for the record that while I may have a low opinion of the Activist Left’s intelligence and self-respect, Barack Obama’s opinion of them must be even lower…

PPS: Great minds think alike.  Down to the title, it seems.