US Census 2010 will not track disability

An article by June Kronholz in The Wall Street Journal announces that the official United States Census, performed every decade, will include only six questions in 2010. None of these will address health or disability status.

An excerpt:

The old long-form census questionnaire, with its queries about house size, commutes to work and other details about daily life is out -- spun off in 2000 to the new American Community Survey, which questions 3 million households a year. For the 2010 census, every member of the country's 120 million households will get a one-page form asking for information that Congress has said it wants to know. (The final form of the questions is subject to congressional review.)

The six remaining questions? Name, relationship to "head of household," gender (two choices) and age. Questions 5 and 6 are required by Congress. Six is a general question about race, and five tries to nail down who is Hispanic and exactly where they're from.

Here's a fun fact:

Under a 2005 order from Congress, question No. 6 also allows people to call themselves "some other race" and identify that race on a fill-in line. In census tests, respondents declared themselves Creole, Aryan, rainbow and cosmopolitan, among others.

Absent along with any disability-related questions: income level, employment status, health care coverage, education, marital status, housing speciifcs, languages used....