Perhaps you did not realize Baucus was chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Neither the President nor Speaker of the House selects the chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Baucus was right, had the Finance Committee voted to keep the public option in, the Republicans would have filibustered of course. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/health/policy/30health.html?_r=0 http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/29/6/1117.full It is worth noting that the Bill initially passed by the House under Pelosi's leadership included the public option and it is only well after it became clear in late 2009 that a Bill containing a public option had no chance of clearing the Senate . (Senator Lieberman (I-CT) vowed he would lead a filibuster) that the Administration finally withdrew its active support for the public option in a last ditch effort to get something through the Senate. Senator Baucus, who was instrumental as chair of the Senate Finance Committee, in seeing that the Public Option was killed, and who voted against both last ditch efforts to keep a version of the option in the Senate Bill, received more campaign money from health insurance industry interests than any other member of Congress.
Obamacare didn't fail. It was an overwhelming success. A lot of bad things happened because of Obamacare, but those bad things happened by design. The plan with Obamacare was to destroy the US healthcare system and implement single payer. Obamacare will get a massive makeover and the government will end with more power than they have under Obamacare. Maybe it will take one or two iterations to get to single payer, but single payer is the plan, and statists will not stop until they get it. The only real failure with Obamacare, as it was intended by its designers, was the fact that they couldn't get the Public Option implemented. The original plan was to set up with the Public Option then kill the private insurers so that only the Public Option would be available and thus de facto single payer would be achieved. The fact that they had to adopt the exchanges instead of the Public Option, complicated the plans of the central planners, but they have not given up on single payer by a long shot. Obama spelled it out quite clearly what the plan was.