A Shorter Health Survey Could Count a Quarter of Wheelchair Users as Not Disabled

PBS NewsHour reports on proposed cuts to a major national health survey and the estimate attached to them: as many as a quarter of wheelchair users and more than a third of people who are blind or deaf could be miscategorized as not disabled because of the shorter survey, according to some advocates and researchers. The claim is not that these people aren't disabled. It's that a shorter instrument would file them differently, which changes who appears in the national statistics built from those questions. A survey is machinery, and how many questions it asks is a design choice whose output is a category.