The missing public option. For the record, I don’t support killing the bill — any modest improvement will still affect real people’s lives. Maybe this Rube Goldberg contraption, sans public option, really is the best we could ever have hoped for, in this political climate. That doesn’t mean it’s not infuriating.
Here’s the full article referenced in the fourth panel.
As to the question of whether or not Obama campaigned on the public option, I defer to Ezra Klein:
For one thing, it was in his campaign plan, which is to say, he campaigned on it … The White House argues that they didn’t emphasize it in public speeches, and according to Salon’s Alex Koppelmann, that’s true. But speaking as someone who did a lot of reporting on their health-care plan, they emphasized it privately quite a bit. It was, in fact, their answer to a lot of the other flaws in their proposal. So whether Obama used it in his speeches, his campaign purposefully pushed it to, at the least, some reporters, which is to say they worked to ensure that people knew about the public option’s important role in their health-care thinking.
Obama’s latest statement on this is hair-splitting at best and misleading at worst. That’s even more true given how often he mentioned the public option after he got elected. And it’s a good example of why the left is losing its trust in Obama.