The House of Representatives just approved the minor changes to reconciliation side car.

Note that, once again, the public option got left on the sidelines.

The Senate said that they had more than 50 votes for it, and the House is supposed to have more than 217 for it, and with the tweak, it could have been put in, but it wasn’t.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Barack Obama agreed to kill the public option very early in this process:

For months I’ve been reporting in The Huffington Post that President Obama made a backroom deal last summer with the for-profit hospital lobby that he would make sure there would be no national public option in the final health reform legislation. (See here, here and here). I’ve been increasingly frustrated that except for an initial story last August in the New York Times, no major media outlet has picked up this important story and investigated further.

John Walker at FDL notes the shifting reasons for killing the public option, and draws what I think is the accurate explanation:

It is foolish to believe that a President, Senate Majority Leader, and Speaker of the House with historically large majorities couldn’t get a public option–which roughly 65% of the country supported–if they really wanted one. Clearly, if they all really wanted to include a public option, they could have done it using reconciliation. To accept their many different excuses of powerlessness requires one to completely suspend reality.

Occam’s razor teaches us the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Here, the simplest explanation is that, months ago, Obama promised to kill the public option as part of a secret deal with the for-profit hospital lobby, and that for months he lied to the American people about supporting the public option while working behind the scenes to stop it.

So, when exactly does that changing the way Washington works thing start again?

(emphasis mine)

Indeed.