This post by John Carney expresses well a lot of the things I have been reading and writing and thinking about the role of special interest groups in the health-care debate:

The Obama administration “expended great effort to line up the support of health-care insurers, pharmaceutical makers and care providers, believing that by keeping them around the table, they could win over Republicans and stop the kind of industry-led attacks that helped sink the Clinton plan,” writes the Journal team.
It was supposed to be a simple formula. Win over the health care industry shepherd, and the Republican will follow like sheep. But it didn’t work.
What seems to have gone wrong can be described as a failure of the imagination: Obama’s administration just never believed Republicans would stand up for their limited government principles if that meant opposing business interests. They were apparently assuming that Republicans and conservatives could be won over by winning over “business interests,” as if free market and anti-government positions were just rhetorical cover for policy making at the behest of business.