Sorry I've just got to say it.....A Public Option would have avoided most of this crap

[Rilgin]

77. a Pubic Option Bill was passed in the house

You do know that the House passed the ACA with a public option included months before the Senate passed the Baucus drafted one. Even before Baucus had a plan drafted.

Obama instead of supporting the House bill which had already been passed and pushing for its passage in the Senate, dismissed it and said he would support what came out of Baucus's committee (which guaranteed it would be weak and without a public option) months later. He gave that support when the Baucus bill was not even written.

Also know that Baucus's committee was NOT the only Senate Committee to have input on the Senate Bill and Obama could again have supported some other senator and committee to write the Senate Bill.

Now maybe with Presidential support and activity the House Bill or a Senate Bill not written by Baucus would have failed the Senate vote. Obama lovers seem to simply assert this as fact rather than opinion. We will never know but lots of bills and laws would have withered on the vine if presidents just assumed that they had no ability to influence a congressional vote that initially looked bad and it may not even be fact that it initially looked bad.

As people have pointed out, his negotiation strategy was not conducive to obtaining the public option from conservative democrats as a compromise. His starting position was giving it away rather than giving away a direct government health care role for public insurance role as the compromise.

However, a public option ACA might have failed no matter what but it is also not FACT that this would not progress us to a better health care system then a passed kludged inadequate ACA. We have seen that gun bills fail but the issue does not die. If the ACA failed, the health care issues would not have disappeared and the pressures for solutions would have continued and increased in intensity.

The main defenses of the ACA lovers are based on two assertions labeled facts that are not facts. They are mere assertions and opinions issued without any supporting evidence (other than just saying certain senators initially said they would initially not vote for a bill with the public option (i.e. Lieberman)). Please notice that recently, republicans said they would never pass the continuing resolution without budget cuts but ended up passing it anyway. Politics is a process not static. Saying a senator said something publicly at the beginning of the process says nothing about what will actually occur in the process. As proof note that Obama said at the start of the process that to obtain his signature, the ACA had to have a public option but he ended up signing the ACA without a public option.

My personal belief and opinion is that with presidential and public pressure Obama could have pealed off sufficient moderate Republican Senators and kept the democratic senators together to pass whatever ACA he really wanted. My second opinion is that the ACA is fatally flawed since it is a small bill that just modestly reforms the private insurance market for individuals without really solving our health care system problems and that its solutions impose real costs on the young and healthy that would be better paid for by taxes than by forcing people to take the time to buy insurance then subsidizing those purchases for some of them.

The beauty of a medicare for all plan versus forcing people to buy things they are not currently using is that the benefits of the system become clear at the time of utilization and the system does not require costs and time before then other than opening an envelope to receive your national health care card.