Obama Promised ‘Public Option’in Winning Vote

By Theodore Kettle,Newsmax

 Obama kisses up to the moderates to get his first bill through,now he will try and change it to add a public option

In pressuring the most liberal Democratic congressmen to vote for the health reform bill that passed the House on Sunday,President Obama soothed their misgivings about its lack of a government-run “public option” by assuring them,“This is a foundation.”

The president added that the tens of millions of people newly covered means “it’s a beginning” toward such a public option that would compete with private insurance.

The revelation comes from a long investigative piece by Ceci Connolly in Tuesday’s Washington Post. The key to passage of Obamacare in the House on Sunday,according to Connolly,“was the personal touch – in carefully-tailored appeals” from Obama “in the closing days.”

Telling the story of one of those presidential appeals,she reports that “Some fence-sitters nearly drowned in presidential attention,” and on March 4 “Obama faced a group of disappointed liberals,many of them supporters of a single-payer,government-run system. They had such high hopes that he would stick to his promise to create a public insurance option,” according to Connolly’s account.

“‘This is a foundation,’ he told them. ‘Thirty-one million Americans will be covered under this. It’s a beginning.’” the Post quotes the president telling the lawmakers who favored European-style socialized medicine,among them Rep. Dennis Kucinich,D-Ohio,who ultimately switched and voted with the president in favor of the Senate bill.

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