It may be a watered-down INITIALLY plan, but it will grow and grow until it is SINGLE-PAYER, NO PRIVATE INSURERS will survive, and this first passage is the beginning of the government complete takeover of the Healthcare Industry, just as they have taken over banking, autos, etc.
This will pass before year-end, and I expect the State-Run-Media to step up its propoganda praising the "compromise" solution to the PROBLEM that doesn't exist.
Another power grab is almost complete.
And your flavor of surrender monkey was bleating like sheep that the public option would be in the final Senate bill. Elections have consequences , of course they are going to get a bill out of the Congress, it was always a matter of pushing to get it as watered down as possible. Did you really expect NO bill to come out of all this. What fantasy world are you mopes and defeatists living in? This was a defeat for Obama, pure and simple. His leftwing base is going to go into orbit over no public option and those BlueDogs gone anyways. The Senate Bill will not reconcile with the House, like oil and water. And contrary to urban myth here, it NOT simply 51 votes after reconciliation. The final billl is subject to all the rules of the Senate including filibuster. Get the popcorn and watch the Democrat party implode, so try and keep yourself from falling into the fetal position at the first sign of resistance.
You have the timeline wrong. Our march to socialized healthcare started in the 1930s when Blue Cross became a tax-free conduit for prepaid healthcare, and in the 1940s when FDR capped wages pushing employers to offer health plans as benefits.
What really needs to be done is to untangle employers and insurers from being preferred healthcare payment channels. The tax code is what makes it that way, and distorts the market through a pile of regulations gathered up over time. People can't afford health care on their own because the market is for large corporations to purchase in bulk from other large insurers who set the prices, and state legislators who target these large organizations.
This also brings up another problem. Making things tax-free to purchase with an income tax system means complicating the tax code, and making it more expensive to hire employees. A sales tax system would work better for such a situation, where you don't tax the people purchasing the product.
And the next Revolution is just around the corner.