Chapter 6: The Trillion-dollar Band-Aid - Health Care Refor Summary and Analysis

In January 2010, Republican Scott Brown took Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat thereby losing the supermajority for President Obama. Nancy Pelosi tried to convince her caucus that the health care bill would still pass by using the reconciliation process which allows for a simple majority to pass legislation. Of course by that time it had been so maligned by politicians and the media that it had been winnowed down to barely version of its original self.

Obamacare had been designed as a massive political deal with big giveaways to pharmaceutical companies in the form of subsidies and a big gift to the insurance industry in the form of the individual mandate. Had this version passed, the federal government would have seized control of 16 percent of the GDP and...