Paul Krugman sets the record straight about what really dragged the health care debate on so long — and, indeed, nearly killed the bill.
It’s easy to see why people who didn’t keep eagle eyes on that process might think the fight over the public option played a huge role. Those words — “public option” — peppered the debate for a full year, and to many casual observers they became a stand-in for the words “health care reform” full stop.
But in reality, they weren’t responsible for a great deal of procedural delay.
If you look back at the calendar, the Gang of Seven (and then the Gang of Six) talks dragged on for months. By contrast, the stretch between when Harry Reid put a health care bill on the floor and when conservative Democrats killed the public option was only a few weeks. (Even then it wasn’t a done deal. Once that was settled, Reid and Chuck Schumer had to put out other fires, including a totally separate flare up over the bill’s abortion language.)
And then Scott Brown won.
So it’s accurate to say that the public option fight was responsible for part of the delay, and it’s accurate to say that the policy argument over the public option permeated the entire reform debate. But it’s certainly not why the Senate took so long to get its work done, or why more than a year passed between when President Obama put health care on the agenda and when he signed those reforms into law.
