Obama Trade Deal Secrecy Insulting, According To Key Democrat

What Dr. Margaret Flowers seems to be saying is that there was no real debate about having a single-payer plan. That those legislators who proposed such a plan were rebuffed and unable to bring their plan to the table for serious discussion. I was so disappointed that the public option was not passed.

The emphasis was on making a law that could pass the House and Senate. So many compromises were made. Dr. Flowers would say that the single payer plan was shut out from consideration.
 
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Either your memory is faulty or you weren't paying attention at the time and weren't aware of the ins and outs of what was going on.

Before work on ACA even began, Obama announced that, "It's Congress's job," he was "staying out of it".  Then he negotiated secretly with Big PhRma, Big Insurance, Hospitals and the AMA and have insurance lobbyists write the legislation through the Senate Finance Committee.  

Obama made sure that there would be no affordable quality medical care for everyone, no public option, no single payer universal healthcare, no means for Americans to choose a public healthcare system, no means for containing healthcare costs.  Obama took single payer off the table and blocked all efforts to get a public option in the final legislation due to the secret deal he made (and then lied about, and then had to own up to when the memo was leaked).

There really never was any debate.  Publicly, Obama was saying, "Everything's (single payer) is on the table", but practically he through Max Baucus had proponents of single payer excluded from the Senate Finance comittee's panels and arrested.  Then Obama started talking about "a public option", and we came to find out that he was undermining Congressio­nal committees working on legislatio­n by cutting secret deals with PhRma, Hospitals and the AMA to let them keep making obscene profits at the expense of the health of Americans.   Then he L!ED about doing it - It took Billy Tauzin and smoking gun memos to prove Obama lied.

The hurdle that Obama had to overcome was the public option (he was never for it), and he took care of that by taking single payer off the table before negotiations ever began.  Had single payer remained on the table, a public option would have been the obvious compromise position to end up at.  

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