Jonathan Bernstein is right that the president never made a secret deal to scrap the public option. But he doesn’t do a very good job of explaining what actually happened. The administration realized very early on that they didn’t have the votes to get a public option. And even the support they thought they had for it started to drift away over the summer of 2009. It wasn’t too hard to predict that a public option would not be in the bill, and the administration made that point in negotiations with some stakeholders.
It wasn’t something that was traded away, but its likely absence from the bill was part of the conversation. I’m sure the administration sought to exact some advantage from the situation by noting, for example, that they weren’t going to get everything they wanted and were going to make concessions. In the meantime, the administration did nothing to discourage its allies from pushing for a public option. Four of the five congressional committees that worked on the Affordable Care Act passed some version of a public option (the exception was Sen. Max Baucus’s Finance Committee). Ultimately, Harry Reid introduced the bill with a public option.
The problem was that we never had 60 votes in favor of a public option. That was true in January 2009 and it was still true in March 2010.
