Peter Suderman has a post over at Reason’s “Hit and Run” blog in which he asks whether Henry Chao, the deputy IT director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, misled Congress during his testimony last week when he claimed that no political considerations (“none whatsoever”) were “involved in the last-minute decision to delay the ‘anonymous shopper’ function at Obamacare’s online insurance portal, HealthCare.gov.” According to Chao, the decision was simply based on the fact that the feature wasn’t working. In fact, he testified that “it failed so miserably that we could not consciously use it.” (That’s an interesting assertion considering the evidence that the whole website didn’t function properly didn’t seem to stop them from launching it anyway.)

As Suderman notes:

But that’s not what happened, according to CNN, which reports that insider documents confirm that, in fact, the feature passed a test of its functionality shortly before the October 1 launch of Healthcare.gov. From CNN’s report:
When the troubled federal health care website came online, the key “Anonymous Shopper” function was nowhere to be found — even though it passed a key test almost two weeks before HealthCare.gov launched.
That successful test, noted in documents obtained by CNN and confirmed by a source close to the project, contradicts testimony from an Obama administration official overseeing HealthCare.gov, who told lawmakers earlier this month the function was scrapped because it “failed miserably” before the October 1 launch.
Perhaps the CNN story is missing some key information. We don’t know, for example, if there was another test that did fail—one that convinced the health site’s tech team that the function wasn’t worth implementing.
But there’s some reason to think that CNN’s story is not incomplete, and that Chao, in his response, did not tell the truth. The CNN report backs up, and seems to confirm, an October report in The Wall Street Journal, which said that the federally run insurance portal “was initially going to include an option to browse before registering, but that tool was delayed.” The Journal report included an explanation for why the function was removed—an explanation that said nothing about technical failures. “An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.”

In other words, it looks like an important factor behind the decision not to use this feature was that the administration didn’t want people to see the price of the premiums without the subsidies. The administration was probably worried that a look at the actual cost of insurance coverage under the law would have likely sent people running for the hills.

Suderman’s post is here.