Who Really Killed the Public Option?

A Look Back at the Losing Strategy that Keeps Hurting Democrats

In late 2009, despite their filibuster-proof majority of 60 seats in the Senate and popular new President, Democrats could not manage to hold their party together long enough to include a public insurance option as part of the Affordable Care Act. NPR’s David Welna, expressing his incredulity at the time, wrote that while “Most polls show that a majority of Americans want a health care overhaul to include a public option…it might seem logical that Senate Democrats, with their 60-vote majority, would include a public option in the bill.” Yet, defying all logic, the Obama administration and the party leadership abandoned the effort after encountering resistance from Democrats in the Senate Finance Committee.

Their argument, accepted by other Democrats and implicitly by the President, was they feared the vote would cost them reelection. And with that, one of the most popular policies in the country was dismissed, and for the next several years Democrats have struggled to market that massive missed opportunity as a resounding success.

There are a number of explanations for a lack of party discipline in the modern era: a broadly weakened party structure, new campaign funding methods, the rise of interest groups, and reduced competition in increasingly gerrymandered districts. There is little dispute that each of these factors contribute, however all of these structural underpinnings apply pretty equally across both parties. Yet, in spite of this, Democrats have shown themselves uniquely inept at maintaining party discipline in support of achieving widely popular policy goals.

Some of this is self-inflicted, like repeatedly helping elect Joe Lieberman who would caucus with Democrats and subsequently vote against them. Democrats like Senator Feinstein of California campaigned for Lieberman — even when he formally left the party — fully aware that his election would weaken the Democrats and undermine her own vote in the future. It’s no wonder individual members are not afraid of bucking the party without fear of consequence — all the interest groups have to do is lean on a handful of representatives — and those representative are fully aware that the party will forgive them long before the interest group.

But the public should not forget. Just last week, Corey Booker, who even as he was earning accolades from the public for testifying against the confirmation of Jeff Sessions as the head of DOJ, quietly voted with Republicans to kill the Sanders/Klobuchar amendment hoping to make affordable Canadian pharmaceuticals accessible to Americans. Not surprisingly, Booker is the single highest recipient of pharmaceutical lobby money over the last 6 years of any Senator. While the incoming Trump administration prepares its long promised repeal of Obamacare, progressives must continue to “out” corporate Democrats like Booker who have for too long relied on savvy public relations to highlight their rhetorical attacks on racial injustice only to stand firmly in defense of the financiers of economic oppression — whose very actions disproportionately hurt the underrepresented communities Booker claims to defend.