He didn't bother to add that he made damn sure there wouldn't be the votes by making sure there was never going to be a vote on PO (of whatever type, and absolutely never ever Medicare for All. Not St. Ronnie-fied enough.)

Robert Reich wrote in TPM that Obama's bill was born in the Heritage Foundation conservative think tank. But he does feel it is indeed a big deal politically.

So don't believe anyone who says Obama's health care legislation marks a swing of the pendulum back toward the Great Society and the New Deal. Obama's health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation, building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation. The New Deal foundation would have offered Medicare to all Americans or, at the very least, featured a public insurance option.

The significance of Obama's health legislation is more political than substantive. For the first time since Ronald Reagan told America government is the problem, Obama's health bill reasserts that government can provide a major solution. In political terms, that's a very big deal.

 CJR's Trudy Lieberman, an excellent source of information and analysis on health care topics adds her take to his piece.

Reich concluded: "Obama's health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation." Perhaps this explains why Obama was lukewarm and equivocal about a public option--much too close to single payer and the Great Society-New Deal paradigm. Key elements of the law are right out of the conservative playbook.

Years ago, conservatives and their think tanks latched onto the individual mandate as the way to get health insurance to Americans. It was ideologically more acceptable than requiring all employers to provide coverage for their workers, and vastly more palatable than a single payer system. Tax credits, too, surfaced years ago, and gained some traction during the 2004 presidential race, when both John Kerry and George W. Bush embraced tax subsidies for families with lower incomes.

At the time, Michael Chernew, then a health policy expert at the University of Michigan and now at Harvard, told The Nation that "the evidence suggests that subsidizing insurance premiums will be a relatively expensive way to encourage coverage, and relatively few people would respond." This year's version is still expensive, but Congress addressed the second part of Chernew's critique; the individual mandate with penalties will require people to respond.

High-deductible insurance is now an integral part of the American health care model. Policies sold in the small group market, for example, will carry deductibles of $4000 for families and $2000 for individuals. As in Massachusetts, policies sold in the Exchanges will also carry high deductibles. The conservative think tank National Center for Policy Analysis--along with Patrick Rooney, then CEO of Golden Rule Insurance, which is now part of the giant UnitedHealth Care--pushed Congress to allow high-deductible health plans. They are quickly moving into mainstream insurance acceptability.

A look at the history of the Massachusetts reform law, the model for national legislation, shows that the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector--the state's name for its shopping exchange--was born at the conservative Heritage Foundation. A document circulated by the staff of Gov. Mitt Romney at the time called for a law reflecting "a culture of insurance" and "personal responsibility"--the latter a keystone of conservative ideology.

The embrace of conservative ideas also helps explain why real cost containment didn't make it into the final product. Curbs on prices are anathema to American business, and perhaps that's why the president made a deal with the drug companies early on not to fight for negotiated prices in the Medicare program, a pledge he had made during his campaign

Obama doesn't want a public option.  He promised his corporate donors in big medicine (insurance and hospitals) he would not propose one or let anyone else do it either. (Teresainpa)

In case anyone needs the smoking gun news report documenting this statement, here's the Aug 2009, NYT article.  When Ed Schultz discovered this tidbit of truth from the Aug 2009 Times (beyond the rumors we're heard of various deals) and brought it up on his show March 15 (over 8+ months after the deal with no reporting on this particular "no-PO" deal in the interim until just recently when it was too late), Ed tried to interest Adam Green in expressing some outrage. Mr Green, however, being a good progressive (head of something called BoldProgressives) and faced with the fact that this old truth rendered moot his efforts to lobby a PO into the HCR bill, and being loyal to the cause of protecting his dear president, curled up into a little ObamaBall and said benignly, "Now's not the time for finger pointing." Wow, that was a watershed moment.

All this talk about "veal pens" and WH throwing progressives under the bus like poor Adam Green makes me wonder two things: 1) Isn't "throwing under the bus" a bit too deadly a metaphor and then they're gone? Why not just a pat on the head the way it used to be phrased, so they can be used again? 2) Was Green (and hundreds of other progressives) used by the WH to present a faux-campaign to whip the PO to pretend sincere energy that Obama could point to in showing his direction, only to quietly collapse at the end?  And then this guy Bennet? A whole system of "progressives" seemed to quietly and conveniently collapse.

Now I'm trying to figure what happened to Ed Schultz who, after stumbling upon that odd response from Adam Green to the NYT article (as did Greenwald and Hamsher and others), himself didn't seem to do anything with it but instead folded up into a rather larger (than Green) ObamaBall and became the virtual official MC on MSNBC for the bandwagon leading up to the final vote, master of ceremonies of the "No PO, no dissent" parade to passage.

The president can't betray the insurance companies he made private assurances to

Insurance co's don't like this bill - there's no cost control.  Oh I know the argument, "but, but, they're gonna get a bunch of customers!"  That's all well and good, but it don't mean much if those customers are costing much more than they put in.

On a gut level I really hate the idea that Brown might be a benefit.  But... I can't really say that you're wrong.

Leslie Fowler, senior aide to Max Baucus, had left Baucus's staff for a two year stint as VP (managing Congress and PR) for WellPoint and returned to Baucus's staff to oversee the writing of the Senate bill.  

Nice, cozy relationship there, eh? And Baucus's chief of staff (with emphasis on health insurance) went to the WH as an ass't chief of staff (with emphasis on health insurance).

Very smooth communication and coordination set in place.

Importantly, Obama did not bring a staffer from Ted Kennedy's staff to the WH to work on health insurance reform.

Karen Ignani, presdient of AHIP, said in an interveiw on C-Span that the predictions were for high increase in health insurance premiums if nothing were done, and now, she said pointedly, the high increases from WellPoint in CA show this is not just hypothetical any longer.