Two different post-mortems from last night’s epic election are in, here and here, and the picture is crystal-clear: stopping government-run health care was by far the number one factor in Scott Brown’s history-making run for the Senate. By large margins, voters said their number one issue was stopping Congress from passing Obamacare. Via Politico:

Fifty-two percent of Bay State voters who were surveyed as the polls closed said they opposed the federal health care reform measure and 42 percent said they cast their ballot to help stop President Obama from passing his chief domestic initiative.

But what’s even more instructive is where the message came from: Massachusetts, a state that is already suffering from the shortcomings of a government-run health care system. Bay Staters are currently experiencing the prolonged waits common in Canada and they’ve seen their premiums rise to the highest in the country. Had this election happened in any other state, even a liberal state, without a government-run health system, the message would be, “We don’t want the reforms that Congress is pushing.” But coming from Massachusetts, a liberal state used as a model for the current health care legislation, the message has so much more…gravitas.

Bay Staters said it loud and clear last night: “We know all about government-run health care, and we’ve had enough.”

Most people know that the House passed one version of a health care bill at 11 pm on a Saturday, while the Senate passed a very different version at 7am on Christmas Eve. Before any bill can go to the President for signature, those differences are normally resolved in what is known as a conference report, negotiated by representatives, called “conferees,” appointed by the House and the Senate.

But Senator DeMint led a behind-the-scenes effort by Senate Republicans to object to the appointment of conferees. The objection means the House will take up the Senate bill, and if any changes are made, the bill has to work its way back through the entire legislative process in the Senate again. And changing the bill means another tough vote for nervous House Democrats, and even more disconcerting for Senator Reid, the bill will have to go through the whole Senate procedure again, working to collect another 60 votes. Further, the process will potentially expose the bill to new amendments from those in Congress who saw the deal Senator Nelson negotiated in exchange for his support.

This is signifcant! Let’s not forget how expensive it was for Reid to get 60 votes the first time. Pelosi and Reid must now huddle behind closed doors, unofficially, and try to hammer out yet another secret bill that is capable of winning the votes of 60 Senators.

Of course, working behind closed doors is nothing new for them. For the past year, Pelosi, Reid and the White House have shrouded their so-called “reform” efforts in secrecy. Beginning in the spring, transparency has been non-existent, first at invitation-only meetings with health insurers and health care providers, when the White House was trying to project a “listening” frame of mind. If only they had listened to the American people.

But the closed door meetings didn’t end there. Throughout the summer, in private chambers on Capitol Hill, Senators like Max Baucus and Christopher Dodd, and Representatives like Charlie Rangel and Pete Stark held private meetings to negotiate a bill away from the bright lights of public scrutiny.

All of this is in direct opposition to a promise made by then-Senator Obama, three months before he was elected President, when he told a crowd in New Hampshire, “…what we will do is, we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies. And so, that approach, I think is what is going to allow people to stay involved in this process.”

Obviously, the President, the Speaker, and the Majority Leader decided it’s better if the American people don’t know who is or isn’t making arguments on their behalf. Of course, the reason for this lack of candor and openness has been painfully obvious – much of what the Democrats have put in the bill is highly controversial, including, but not limited to a government-run public option plan, drastic reduction in Medicare funding for Seniors, unfunded Medicaid expansion which will bankgrupt our states and a Byzantine network of Federal agencies staffed by bureaucrats that will make health care decisions on our behalf. All of which runs counter to the very simple thing that Americans are demanding from Congress – lower health care costs.

As the President’s first official State of the Union address looms, expect the White House to be heavily involved in trying to salvage political points from whatever results from the back groom horse-trading that is sure to go on during the early weeks of the new year.

What are we up to now, six different names for the public option? Let us count the ways desperate Democrats have tried to re-brand, re-tool, re-name or re-invent what is, by all accounts, a plot that will ultimately force millions of Americans into the waiting arms of government health care bureaucrats.

During the 2008 campaign, the public option was described as “government-run plan similar to Medicare.” Whoa…really? The same Medicare plan that cannot now meet its own financial obligations and is projected to be come up short by $38 trillion by the time the youngest Americans will need it? No wonder we haven’t heard that description much lately.

After the presidential inauguration, talk of the public option steadily picked up steam, reaching a fever pitch in August when senior citizens were shouting down their elected officials and canceling their AARP memberships in droves, and while Tea Party activists were getting their fingers bitten off at town hall meetings – all due to strong opposition against any form of government-run health care.

By late October, Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew it was a tough sell. She began slathering lipstick on the public option pig, calling it both the “consumer option” and the “competitive option.” It didn’t stick, and it didn’t matter, because a large number of House Democrats are hell-bent on getting the government’s foot in the door of private health care so they would have voted for it no matter what it was called.

But the Senate is a different ballgame, and that 60-vote hurdle is looming. To clear it, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has some serious sugar-coating to do before his colleagues will choke down any version of the public option. So far, it’s been floated as an “opt-out” public option, an “opt-in” public option, and a “trigger” public option.

Next week, Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) will, as he says, attempt to “thread the needle” by recasting the public option yet again. Thus far he’s been tight-lipped about his plans, but it really doesn’t matter.

A bait-and-switch can only work when it takes the victim by surprise, an opportunity Sen. Carper and the Democrats lost months ago. Even House Finance Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has admitted that the public option will lead to government-run health care and may even be the best way to get there.

They can sugar-coat the public option all they want, but it’s still a poison pill.