The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning to significantly reduce the scope of the National Health Interview Survey, a 69-year-old project that gathers data on the health of Americans. The planned redesign, intended to address declining response rates, would cut the number of questions from 490 to approximately 200 to 225 by 2028. Advocates and researchers warn that this streamlining could lead to as many as a quarter of wheelchair users and over a third of people who are blind or deaf being incorrectly categorized as not disabled. The survey currently asks questions about issues such as memory, fatigue, arthritis, difficulty with mobility, and the use of assistive devices. Removing these questions would eliminate key data points used to understand the health needs of disabled Americans and track the impact of policy changes on this population.
The National Health Interview Survey, conducted annually by the U.S. Census Bureau on behalf of the CDC, costs $40 million per year and surveys around 30,000 households. Its data has informed public understanding of conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome, seizure prevalence, and health insurance coverage, and serves as a benchmark for measuring progress on issues like obesity and smoking. Officials acknowledge the cuts but suggest they may not be as drastic as initially proposed. Stephen Blumberg, who oversees the survey at the CDC, stated the goal is to reduce the survey length to about a half hour, as the current version can take an hour or more to complete. Scott Landes, a Syracuse University sociology professor, expressed concern that “We just won't know any of that anymore,” referring to the loss of detailed data on disability-related health concerns. The decline in participation is attributed to people being busy, privacy concerns, and distrust in surveys.
Our reading is the proposed changes to the National Health Interview Survey, while framed as a response to declining participation, risk significantly undermining the quality of data available on the health of disabled Americans. The stated goal of reducing survey length appears to conflict with the potential for misclassification of vulnerable populations, as key data points related to disability will be removed. We interpret the acknowledgement by officials that the cuts “may not be as drastic as initially proposed” as a sign of internal debate or potential responsiveness to external pressure.
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