Regarding the Public Option, it's worth watching this Frontline episode to understand how... [View all]
...the healthcare bill morphed over time from one thing into an entirely different thing. This program is an hour but it is well worth your time to watch to understand what happened.
Watch online at PBS
Since the Supreme Court is reviewing the law, the topic has come up quite a bit on DU here over the last few days, including discussion about the Public Option. I've seen wishful thinking to outright fabrications on the matter. This also serves as a study of President Obama's early style of negotiating-away core campaign promises in order to get something, anything through, legislatively. In the end, he had to bribe some members of his own party to vote for the damned thing.
His weak (or perhaps overly-pragmatic) negotiating skills, combined with a hardball-playing healthcare insurance industry, a craven GOP and a Democratic Party which worked against Obama as much as helped him...all of these things helped build the house of cards the Supreme Court will likely blow down.
I've seen people here rooting for the individual mandate as though it were President Obama's idea and something worth defending. It wasn't. It was one of the key demands from the healthcare industry to lock all of us into purchasing from the private healthcare market. Their other demand? The Public Option had to die before they'd come to the table.
If the healthcare law goes down, we need to fight for something better. America needs it. Obama has already learned his lesson the hard way. If the Supreme Court rules this law unconstitutional in its entirety, we can use election year pressure to get something better.
If you only have one minute to spare, watch from 2:15 to 3:15 of this excerpt:
The whole episode is worth watching. The story is so much more complex than that.
PB
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