> Specifically, if you want to blame someone, it was Joe Lieberman who would have been the deciding vote, and he killed it.

I too believed that Joe Lieberman sucked, and sure, he did. However: there's a pattern of parties creating convenient designated villains within the party (usually someone not up for re-election) who can take the blame for doing the thing the party insiders planned to do all along. It's been especially noticeable in the current Congress.

When the designated villain sticks it to us next time, notice how there are zero consequences for them.

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dghlsakjg 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe it’s a massive insider conspiracy to have the party ruin its own landmark legislation of the era and all of the coconspirators have kept their mouth shut on a major scandal for more than a decade.

Maybe it was the 1.1 million dollars in donations from the healthcare industry to Joe Lieberman.

We may never know.

	▲	mullingitover 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Maybe it was the 1.1 million dollars in donations from the healthcare industry to Joe Lieberman. Frankly Joe should've been furious about how little he received, then: > Campaign finance: The key players in the crafting of Obamacare were largely dependent upon health industry corporations for election and re-election. Barack Obama received $22.4 million in 2008, and the health sector was his third-most-important source of corporate donors (health industry donations alone were thirty-two times greater than all labor union contributions to Obama). The twenty-three members of the Senate Finance Committee (SFC) received nearly $16 million in 2008 and $20 million in 2010. Since 2003, the Committee’s Chair, Max Baucus, had received $3.4 million, or 23 percent of his total campaign donations; the minority leader, Republican Charles Grassley, had received $2 million. Committee members’ opposition to a “public option” that would compete with private insurers tended to correlate with donations from the health industry over the previous two decades.27 The structure of the electoral process thus guaranteed the presence of health industry loyalists in key Congressional offices. Source: https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2014/10/01/healthy-wealthy-an...