Shocker: Obama officials lied about why they deleted a user-friendly feature of Healthcare.gov

One of the big complaints about the Obamacare website is that you can't get a single bit of information until you enter a huge amount of personal information.

Thus it will surprise you to learn that part of the $634 million of your dollars spent to develop the website was for a much friendlier, easier-to-use feature called "Anonymous Shopper," which let you see what insurance plans were available without having to enter all your personal data first.

How...logical.  Helpful.  Obvious.

And unlike the rest of the website, this feature passed all the tests before the vaunted October 1st rollout of the whole site.  In fact the feature was successfully tested on September 17th.

The very next day Henry Chao--the deputy chief information officer at HHS--in an internal e-mail obtained by CNN, wrote that the "Anonymous Shopper" function “isn’t needed and thus should be removed.”

One wonders where the determination that it "isn't needed" came from.  The betting is that Obama's political enforcers gave that order because they didn't want Americans to see the actual cost of health plans until the system had enough information to calculate how much *subsidy* they could receive.

But wait, it gets even better:  Chao was called before a congressional committee last week, and was asked why the Anonymous Shopper feature was deleted:

Chao said he made the decision in conjunction with colleagues and testified...that it was because the feature “failed so miserably that we could not conscionably let people use it.”

This directly contradicts the internal email from Chao.

Also, the notion that HHS found any function on Healthcare.gov to have “failed so miserably that we could not conscionably let people use it” is laughably absurd.  Isn’t that a good description of the entire site?

If Chao really consulted with "colleagues" before making the decision he should have no trouble identifying them, and there should be email discussing the decision.  Congress should be able to interview those colleagues and see if details match.  Any competent attorney should be able to prove Chao is lying. 

Wonder how all these Obama employees got the idea they could brazenly lie to congress without any consequence?  Maybe they saw how Eric Holder got away with it.