Another point, the best friend health care reform has had is the GOP base and Obama knew that letting the media focus on things like the teabaggers, birthers, and tenthers would ultimately serve him very very well.

I summed it up as such at the time… “today the insurance industry made the case for government run health care better than any Democrat could have.”

http://trueslant.com/justingardner/2009/10/13/yes-lets-trust-the-insurance-industrys-numbers/

I think that there was another card that got played, and that was the fact that the insurance industry enjoys exception from anti-trust laws. For all of their talk about “competion” insurance companies have profited from the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson Act (15 U.S.C. § 1011) which exempted the insurance industry from federal antitrust laws. It was passed after the SCOTUS ruled in United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Association (322 U.S. 533) that insurance was covered under the interstate commerce clause of the constitution. The entire health insurance industry is dominated by a handful of insurance companies, in Alabama 89% of all health insurance is supplied a single firm, Blue Cross of Alabama while in North Dakota, it is 90%. Now there is a move to repeal the 1945 law. Where they holding that one back for the right moment?