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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

So why didn't they all vote for Obamacare and for the public option, subsidized by higher taxes?

Because there was nobody to vote for who offered that. McCain's proposal was to deny that the problem existed. Obama's proposal was Obamacare without an individual mandate. Clinton's proposal was Obamacare with an individual mandate. Those were the only entrees on the proverbial menu. No candidate ran on a public option, so you couldn't vote for that even if you desperately wanted to.

Ironically, one of the first moves of the candidate who got the most votes, Obama, was to decide that Hillary Clinton had been right after all and include an individual mandate. So if you voted for him over her because you opposed that idea, you were officially SOL.

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The public option was specifically killed off by insurance industry lobbying by Karen Ignagni, as were reductions in Medicare drug prices by the equivalent guy for the pharmaceutical industry. As I understand it, Obama wanted a public option, but had enough difficulty getting Obamacare passed at all, and those sacrifices (along with requiring the individual mandate) were the price of preventing hundreds of millions of dollars of anti-Obamacare attack ads from those two industry lobbies.

I'm not sure how much more to the story there is than that, but for reference, see: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/obamasdeal/

> Obama's proposal was Obamacare without an individual mandate. Clinton's proposal was Obamacare with an individual mandate. Those were the only entrees on the proverbial menu. No candidate ran on a public option

Actually, all of Obama, Clinton, and Edwards ran on a public option. They differed on other points (as you note, during the primary Obama opposed and Clinton supported an individual mandate, and there were various other differences between the three plans, but largely Clinton and Obama cribbed their plans from the same place Edwards did first, so they all looked pretty similar.)

They sometimes mentioned a public option, but it was never central to either Obama's or Hillary's pitch.

See here for an evaluation of Obama on the issue: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/dec/... It was included in his platform, but as an "also, too" kind of thing. And if you took your evaluation of his position from what he said on the stump, you'd never have known it was in his platform at all.

(I'm omitting Edwards from this discussion because he flamed out so early.)

My recollection is that it was included, but then traded to the relevant industries for their acceptance of the plan we have now. Whether it was always intended as a chip or was a serious part of the plan is open for debate I suppose, but the best chips are ones that are serious, so I'm not sure there's much difference in practice.

Kind of, in that opponents of any bill were joined by some Senators that were closely tied to the insurance industry to threaten to filibuster the bill (which passed the House with a public option) if a public option was included, looking several attempts (both passing the form the House did and putting forward different public mechanisms) to include a public option in the Senate version, and dropping the public option was the only way to secure Senate passage.

There was one primary candidate who offered better than that: [Dennis Kucinich campaigned on a single payer platorm][0]. However, for various reasons, he never topped fourth place in primary polling.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Kucinich_presidential_c...

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