Thanks for dropping the “public option” after going into closed door negotiations with the insurance companies for three weeks and coming out with a mandate handing them millions of new captive market participants and putting few, very sacred few limitations or regulatory requirements for how to run their industry. Thanks for dismantling your campaign infrastructure when the GOP started playing “the heel”.

This is the reason why he stopped Bernie. He (and many others in the Democratic Party leadership) knew that only a huge populist movement like Bernie’s could tear power out of the hands of financial/industrial Oligarchs. He’s terrified that if we get some variation of universal healthcare in his lifetime, EEEEEEEVERYONE is going to go back through all that bullshit they said, all the excuses they made, and rub their faces in it. Not only that but also most of these crooked politicians are heeeeaaavily invested in the various private healthcare companies.

I am not a particularly religious person, but I know this to be true: You can’t serve two masters.

I recall they had to drop the public option after Ted Kennedy died and they no longer had a supermajority in the Senate. To get around a Republican filibuster, they had to rely on a less than ideal version of the bill through the reconciliation process

This is the constant Democratic Party refrain. We sure wish we could have done {insert good thing} but when the iron was hot, by golly, we just couldn’t find our hammer.

Then the iron got cold so we had to, shucks, pass a version of the bill that was much more attractive to our donors and screw over the voters.

Golly gee willickers, what rotten luck.

Meanwhile the GOP with the slimmest majority and 3 turncoat Dems. “Time to rewrite the tax code, no need to type it up frank just scribble it in the margin, we will figure out how many billions to give the wealthy once it’s passed”

Except that is literally what happened. Kennedy died while they were negotiating the bill with the GOP (that was fucking stupid and pointless. They got zero GOP votes). Massachusetts has a special election and barely elects Scott brown® to fill the seat for 2 years, the first time in 50+ years the state had a GOP senator (Of course, 2 years later, they vote him out. They had a GOP senator just long enough to break the Dems super majority and kill single payer. Thanks massholes.)

So who does that leave as the deciding vote? The “Independent” Joe Lieberman of connecticut, who was heavily funded by insurance companies HQ’d in his state, and refused to vote for the bill with single payer attached.

So Obama, being the poster boy of “compromise can save us”(also fucking stupid), went ahead as is and pulled it out.

That’s the actual history. Dems fucked up by trying to find middle ground with the GOP, back when social media didn’t have everyone in a vise and you could still lie yourself that that was possible.