Obama Officials, Get This, Lied About Reason For Dropping Customer-Friendly Part of Healthcare.gov

The "Anonymous Shopper" tool didn't require anyone to enter in all their personal information before checking out insurance plans.

Amazing idea, huh? Shopping for your plan before you enter all of your personal and financial data. Bear in mind, they're not even just asking for your name, billing address, and credit card number; they want All The Things.

Now, why wasn't this part of Healthcare.gov included with Healthcare.gov?

Well, you have two choices. You choose the version you find more plausible.

1) The Anonymous Shopper option wasn't included because Obama knew the public would recoil from the sticker shock of seeing the real prices for insurance he was offering, unmitigated by the cushion of a subsidy. Sure, a lot of people aren't getting subsidies, and so a lot of people will see the huge new costs of insurance under the president's Save Your Family $2500 Per Year law, but he wanted to keep the number of people seeing these huge new premiums to a minimum.

So, he told his people to take this option out. This then required people to enter all their most personal financial data before even seeing what the hell they'd be buying, so that the system could, in theory, calculate a subsidy and deduct it from the premium.

Note that this causes a great deal of problems for the system, as all the tough stuff must be done first.

And he did all this jackass shit, sabotaging his own website, in order to, get this, further deceive the public about the Exciting New Super-High Premiums people would pay under Obamacare.

Or:

2) The Anonymous Shopper feature, the most dead-simple sort of thing you can do on the web (it shows products and prices; some innovation, huh?) just didn't work, so they scrapped it.

Unlike the rest of Healthcare.gov, which they apparently thought was workin' fine.

Now, you-all are a suspicious lot, so I can guess many of you are leaning towards Option 2.

But you're wrong: Documents released by the Administration prove that the Anonymous Shopper function really wasn't working, and that's the only reason they disabled it.

Ah, I'm just fuckin' with you. Of course they lied. And they didn't just, get this, lie to the public about it.

They, get this, lied to Congress about it, which is a little more problematic than lying to the doormat American Public.

Now remember: The Administration's claim is that this feature was taken out due to technical snags. They're specifically denying they chose to disable the feature, because that would imply they did so for reasons of political dishonesty.

Via CNN:

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

...

The source close to the project, however, said the anonymous shopper function did pass testing conducted in the weeks ahead of the HealthCare.gov launch.

...

The successful test occurred on September 17, according to a source familiar with the project. The next day, in an internal e-mail obtained by CNN, Chao wrote the shopper function “isn’t needed and thus should be removed.”

By "isn't needed" you are free to read "is politically unhelpful."

Every single of them is just lying now. Every single thing they say is a lie.

posted by Ace at 04:34 PM

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