The CDC Is Shrinking Its Flagship Health Survey, and Disability Questions Are the First Cut
A redesign of the 69-year-old National Health Interview Survey would cut it from 482 questions to 150, dropping measures on hearing aids, mobility, and cognition that advocates say could undercount Americans with disabilities by as much as 75%.
The federal government's longest-running health survey is getting a lot shorter, and advocates say the cuts land hardest on the people least able to afford being uncounted. STAT News reported on October 1 that the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics is redesigning the National Health Interview Survey, a project that has tracked American health since 1957, trimming it from 482 questions to 150. Gone are questions about hearing aids, fatigue, cognition, and mobility supports like wheelchairs and scooters.
A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson said the redesign is "driven by a push to lower the cost of data collection" but declined to explain why disability-specific items were singled out. Disability advocates say the functional-disability questions are exactly the ones that catch people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, a population they warn could be undercounted by as much as 75% under the new framework. "If we don't have the government as a trusted source of data, asking questions about real people and what their real experiences are, we're never going to get better health outcomes," Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc, told STAT.
Surveys are brand signals too, just for institutions instead of companies: what a government chooses to measure tells you what it has decided counts. Syracuse University sociologist Scott Landes points out that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities already have the highest mortality rates of any disability group, which makes this a strange year to stop asking.
Source: STAT News
Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
