Not Romney, not Heritage... not Baucus who Obama chose... but Obama himself sold us out.
Obama and the Sentate democrats sold us out. How many fricken times are you going to try and rewrite history Piezoe.
The option was also omitted from the president’s proposal, Principles for Health Reform, released 22 February 2010 prior to a bipartisan health care summit. Likewise, it was not present in the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House and Senate and signed into law by President Obama in March 2010.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/29/6/1117.full
Senate Democrats were engaged in a highly contentious debate throughout the fall of 2009, and the political life of the public option changed almost daily. The debate reached a critical impasse in November 2009, when Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), who usually caucuses with the Democrats, threatened to filibuster the Senate bill if it included a public option.
During this period, several alternatives were considered. One compromise proposal included a Medicare buy-in for people age fifty-five and older. However, both Senator Lieberman and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) opposed the Medicare buy-in, which evoked concerns similar to those raised about the public option. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) proposed using nonprofit health care cooperatives to compete with for-profit plans, but this concept also sparked little enthusiasm.
Debate over the public option continued as additional proposals were made to narrow eligibility for the public option and to raise the rates paid to providers above Medicare levels. When those, too, failed to garner enough support, the public option was eliminated from the Senate bill.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) made last-minute attempts to introduce amendments to include a public option as the bill was about to be voted on by the Senate Finance Committee. Those failed, and there was no public option in either the bill that emerged from that committee or the bill that passed the full Senate on 24 December 2009 (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, HR 3590).
The option was also omitted from the president’s proposal, Principles for Health Reform, released 22 February 2010 prior to a bipartisan health care summit. Likewise, it was not present in the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House and Senate and signed into law by President Obama in March 2010.