Obama never wanted the public option

Barack Obama, Inc.

Cenk Uygur
Posted: December 16, 2009 12:18 PM

On health care reform, Obama on the surface appears to be challenging the status quo in a major way and fighting for universal coverage. But what does that mean? The way the Senate bill is written now 30 million new Americans will get insurance coverage. That's great, right? Yes, it's great for the private insurance companies. They get all of those new customers and with the help of Barack Obama they defeated any new competition from a public option or expanded Medicare. And now there's a mandate that everyone must buy insurance from those same companies that Obama was supposedly challenging. Change you can believe in!

You might be thinking, wait a minute that was Lieberman who insisted that we kill the public option and protect the corporations. Yes, but there'll always be Liebermans in the world. Obama told us that he would fight for us against the corporate sell-outs of the world like Lieberman. And he most certainly did not. Instead, he ordered the other Senate Democrats to stand down and bow their heads to Lieberman. That's because Obama never wanted the public option. While claiming in public that he thought it was a good idea, behind the scenes he fought to kill it at every turn.

I wasn't predisposed to think this. I voted for Obama and really did think he was going to bring us some degree of change. I gave him the benefit of the doubt in a hundred different ways. But every time the public option came up, he sent Rahm Emanuel out to knock it down. But it's not just the public option.

The drug industry also received massive protection from the Obama administration. Some people think Obama is weak and that he can't enforce his will on stubborn senators. That's not true. When Byron Dorgan introduced a bill that would allow drug importation from Canada, Obama came down like a ton of bricks on Democratic senators and switched a huge number of votes so that in the end the drug industry won. That cost the American taxpayer nearly $100 billion in the next ten years alone. Score another victory for Barack Obama, Inc.

I could go on and on about the health care bill and tell you dozens of ways that corporate America was protected and how more customers were funneled their way. But there are so many other issues on which Obama has sold out to corporate America that I want to get to those as well. The biggest one being so-called financial reform.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/barack-obama-inc_b_394259.html