Hillary's new slogan: No We Can't!

[Rilgin]

102. To add to this

Buacus was important in the Senate as he chaired a committee but it was just one of many committees with a role in drafting and approving the attempt to reform health care. He was the chosen hit man to derail the public option which was "the compromise" given to single payer advocates in theory before being yanked out at the end when we were told that was not politically possible.

I am pretty sure you Bvar know but most people do not know that Nancy Pelosi worked hard and managed to pass the ACA with a public option out of the house fully a year before the Senate finally had a bill that could go to reconciliation. I am sometimes critical of Pelosi but this is something she did that was great and required the type of pressure that Obama never used to wrangle the democratic house members into voting for it. Again, the house bill had a public option and this was the bill that was reconciled against the Senate a year later. It was not easy for her to get this Bill passed and she managed to do it which tells us all that with someone of power (speaker, president, majority leader) pushing his caucus things can be possible (not definite but definitely possible).

Obama's failure was a failure to support this bill and pressure the Senate to consider the house bill. We can not know for sure how it would have worked out and if we would have ended up with the compromise public option but Obama took the exact opposite path. The white house declared that the House bill would not be the basis of the end bill and that whatever bill Baucus drafted would be the basis. This was putting a declared opponent of the public option in charge of drafting the bill and guaranteed that we would not have a Public Option in the final bill.

So one reason that Baucus became important is because Obama emphasized his importance rather than pressured him.