Obama never secretly killed the public option. It’s a myth. [View all]

[FrenchieCat]

(just thought I would park this article somewhere.....although it has a Nov 2011 dateline)

Did Obama secretly kill the public option?
The question is still an important one for many liberals. The claim lives on to this day, and is still seen as perhaps the clearest evidence from Obama’s first term that liberals ultimately can’t trust him on their core priorities, and won’t be able to trust him going forward.
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The background: There were certainly two significant deals that the White House made with interest groups. One was with the drug companies, to leave re-importation out of health care reform. The second, with the hospitals, limited how much ACA would cost them. But some liberals believed that the White House was also out to get the public option from the beginning. This first arose when problem comes when one HuffPo blogger decided that a David Kirkpatrick story in the New York Times and a later Kirkpatrick interview on MSNBC proved it.....
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However, Kirkpatrick, as I read it, only confirmed that there was a deal (on costs) with the hospitals, not that it included the public option. He wrote in the original story that there was a belief that a public option would not wind up in the bill. But that was more an assessment of where the votes were going to fall than part of any agreement. There was nothing there to confirm a deal on the public option.
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There simply was no reported deal to kill the public option. If you want to blame someone for killing the public option, blame marginal Democrats, who opposed it, and marginal Republicans (especially Olympia Snowe), who initially backed a version of the bill with the public option before deciding that pretty much all of Obamacare was unconstitutional. There’s no reason to believe that Barack Obama sold out liberals on this one.