Klein/Begala great read on where we've been and how we got here.

Begala

No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt's original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers -- a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn't even cover the clergy. FDR's Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn't work, you got nothing from Social Security.

snip

I carry a heavy burden of regret from my role in setting the bar too high the last time we tried fundamental health reform. I was one of the people who advised President Bill Clinton to wave his pen at Congress in 1994 and declare: "If you send me legislation that does not guarantee every American private health insurance that can never be taken away, you will force me to take this pen, veto the legislation, and we'll come right back here and start all over again." I helped set the bar at 100 percent -- "guarantee every American" -- and after our failure it's taken us 15 years to start all over again.

Klein

The trickiest part of my job right now is to balance the desire for a better bill with the need to argue that the bill that's likely to emerge still makes for a better country. You don't want to ease the pressure on Congress too early, but you don't want to see your allies forget that this is about more than the public option. Imagine for a second that health-care reform looks exactly like the House bill, but the public option is excluded. What will be easier over the next 10 years? Passing a simple piece of legislation that establishes a public option? Or starting from scratch with a 1,000-plus-page bill that spends $1.3 trillion expanding coverage, and regulates insurers, and creates health insurance exchanges, and reforms the delivery system, and cuts payments to the private insurers overcharging Medicare ... and all the rest of it?

You don't want to compromise too early. But nor do you want to realize that you should have compromised only to learn that it's too late. I don't know where we are along that continuum. But Begala has seen this fail before, and it has taken us 15 years to return to the place where we can conceive of passing a worse piece of legislation. He's worth listening to.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/08/what_social_security_teaches_u.html