Boosters for the Obama administration claim that his Affordable Care
Act is a legacy that qualifies Obama for permanent residence in the
pantheon of progressive domestic policy presidents, like Franklin
Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Black Agenda Report takes the opposite
position: that, in 2009, newly-elected President Obama set the cause of
universal health care back many years with his surprise endorsement of a
Republican health insurance plan, hatched in the bowels of the Heritage
Foundation in the 1980s and championed by GOP presidential candidate
Bob Dole in 1996 and Massachusetts Republican Governor Mitt Romney
shortly thereafter. Obama’s bill was written by the health insurance and
pharmaceutical corporations, and brutally imposed on the Left wing of
the Democratic Party, whose members were threatened with loss of party
campaign support if they resisted.
Cleveland Congressman Dennis Kucinich was the last holdout for the
so-called Public Option, a scaled down alternative to Obama’s
corporate-based scheme that finally disappeared altogether – as did Rep.
Kucinich’s seat in Congress, which was redistricted out from under him.
The White House justified its abandonment of Single Payer health
care, claiming compromise was necessary in order to get Republican
votes. But the Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress, and
Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote.
-- Glen Ford, "Single Payer Health Care Still More Popular Than Obamacare" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).