Seth Masket dismisses liberal handwringing:
My impression of what actually happened is that Obama looked at the political scene and said, there are two real veto players here: me and Senate Republicans. So let's cut a deal and not worry about everyone else. He might well have looked back at the debate over health care reform and thought, wow, the entire nation debated this for over a year, and it didn't really move the issue at all. The public option didn't get more or less popular -- it always looked pretty popular but probably not commanding the support of 60 Senators. And the bill that he signed into law looked remarkably like what he'd originally outlined a year earlier. So it strikes me as legitimate to ask what the value of all that debate was.