ObamaCare: the “success” so wonderful that Big Government keeps trying to bury the data in shallow graves filled with bags of lime. After months of hearing the Administration relentlessly lie about not having vital information – true number of paid and valid enrollees, how many of them were previously uninsured, how many of them were young and healthy revenue targets – now we learn the Census Bureau is getting in on the act.

The New York Times – not exactly a hostile institution where the Obama Administration and its signature “achievement” are concerned – delivers the news under the headline, “Census Survey Revisions Mask Health Law Effects.”

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. The changes are intended to improve the accuracy of the survey, being conducted this month in interviews with tens of thousands of households around the country. But the new questions are so different that the findings will not be comparable, the officials said. An internal Census Bureau document said that the new questionnaire included a �??total revision to health insurance questions�?� and, in a test last year, produced lower estimates of the uninsured. Thus, officials said, 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. �??We are expecting much lower numbers just because of the questions and how they are asked,�?� said Brett J. O�??Hara, chief of the health statistics branch at the Census Bureau. With the new questions, �??it is likely that the Census Bureau will decide that there is a break in series for the health insurance estimates,�?� says another agency document describing the changes. This �??break in trend�?� will complicate efforts to trace the impact of the Affordable Care Act, it said.

How very, very, very conveeeeeeeenient. Later in the story, it says “for reasons that are not clear, people were less likely to respond when interviewers used the new questionnaire.” That’s awfully convenient, too. Golly gosh gee wilikers, I guess we’ll just have to take Honest Barack’s word on how well his health-care scheme is addressing the problem it was created to solve. If you like your Census, you can keep your Census.

If we take this “internal Census Bureau document” seriously, it means the surveys that gave us the often-touted numbers of uninsured prior to 2010 were inaccurate, and they knew it. Can we have our freedom back now? How much more of the arguments and promises made when ObamaCare was stuffed down our throats by Democrats must be revealed as fraudulent before the American people can get out of this lousy deal?

Obama and his allies were the ones that mis-represented both the numbers of the uninsured, and the reasons they lacked insurance. It’s extremely important to keep the data set consistent, so we can judge how much the uninsured population is changing, and why. It’s ludicrous to break the data chain, in what the Census Bureau describes as an “unfortunate coincidence.” Is it just another “unfortunate coincidence” that the White House began managing the Census Bureau under Barack Obama?

Update: Mediaite has a roundup of reactions to the Census Bureau’s announcement. The word “insane” is used. I strongly object to that characterization. I think the people behind this knew exactly what they were doing.