There was a government option in the original ACA. Dems couldn’t get the votes to overcome the filibuster in the senate to pass it. It had nothing to do Obama u turning. It was an amazing feat to get it passed in congress and get 60 votes in the senate.
The u-turn came long before that acronym existed, as I remember it. The Dems had been trying to build consensus for some kind of single payer plan for almost twenty years by that point, and practically the first thing Obama said after being elected was that as a show of good faith he would take single payer was off the table.
Maybe today the ACA is thought of as progressive, especially in the sense that the right wants it to end and the left doesn't; but in its time I think it was rightly understood as the Democrats caving to a massive transfer from the public to the private sector. I recall the private insurers' stock prices all going up 10-20% that week.
Obama was pretty timid. Especially at the beginning of his presidency he assumed that his fellow democrats like Lieberman and Baucus were rational and wanted the best for the country and not just being pawns for the insurance industry. I bet if he had pounded the table, he would have way more success. Heck, LBJ made senators cry to get things done.
Hindsight is 20/20. I recall Obama later saying he wished he was more radical because he only realised too late that the holdouts to ACA were never going to vote for it. Essentially, they negotiated in bad faith but Obama only realised this after they’d made all the requested changes and still couldn’t get the votes.
My ex worked at Congress at the time and even stupid me realized quickly that Obama was being played. I remember having fights with her when I told her that Obama is naive. Maybe they don’t see what’s going on when they are on the inside.
I can totally believe that. I mean, look at the shock that Democrats have had to Trump doing all the authoritarian things he said he'd do!
I saw a similar thing in the UK where the newly-minted Labour government thought they could combat ReformUK on asylum policy. Luckily, I think they're slowly starting to realise that, no matter how hard they tack, ReformUK will always promise something more insane and unworkable.
I can't help but think of the American left as Charlie Brown and the right as Lucy holding the football. Once you realize the left is always willing to cede real power to win a moral victory over itself, it's just too easy to push that button and keep pushing it until the resistance eats itself.
They'll find something on Zohran, or else he'll make some compromise that makes the left turn on him. It's just a matter of time.
