Taken together, these initiatives would route yet more public money through a corporate insurance bureaucracy in hopes that medical care eventually trickles down to Americans who desperately need it. Such a system is totally inadequate during a pandemic: it doesn’t guarantee healthcare – it only only guarantees insurance coverage, which is so often denied or restricted when a medical claim is actually filed. Moreover, corporate health insurance has far higher administrative costs than single-payer programs like Medicare, and even the much-vaunted Affordable Care Act allows insurers to siphon up to 20% of customers’ premiums to corporate profits rather than actual medical care.

But then, Democrats’ Cobra plan is not merely a financial bailout for insurers – it is also a political bailout when the industry needs it most. At a time when popular support for Medicare for All is surging – when even a Republican president feels the need to make rhetorical (if empty) gestures toward the concept of government-funded healthcare – the Cobra plan would use public money to firm up the private health insurance industry’s dominance over the healthcare system, just in time to short circuit a Medicare expansion.

That’s probably why insurance companies have been lobbying for it. They know that such a program would boost their short-term profits, and they know that once such a program is in place, it would be politically difficult to get it repealed and replaced by progressives’ far better Medicare for All program. In other words: Democrats’ Cobra plan may secure insurance companies’ profit-skimming position between Americans and their healthcare providers for decades to come.

If you get the sense that the fix is in and this is all deliberate, you’re not wrong. Many of the self-styled progressive advocacy groups in Washington that posture as #resistance leaders turned a blind eye to the bill’s problems and endorsed the legislation shortly after it was introduced, undercutting progressive lawmakers off the bat.

Making matters worse was the theater on the House floor. During the debate over the Democratic bill, nine progressive lawmakers made a public show of voting against the procedural measure to advance the bill, along with a tiny group of moderates. When it came to the real vote on actually passing the bill, a larger group of moderates ended up voting against it, but only one progressive lawmaker, Representative Pramila Jayapal, voted no. Had the progressives and moderates combined forces on either of the votes, they would have forced the bill back to the drawing board. Instead, their shenanigans ultimately helped secure the legislation’s passage.

Taken together, the spectacle was more confirmation that whatever resistance exists in the nation’s capital, it is so often performance art, rather than anything real.

“Outside groups and House lawmakers need to work together to build a populist bloc – probably inclusive of moderate Democrats and perhaps even an occasional Republican – who will stand united to force votes to ensure that our economy does right by ordinary people,” said David Segal of Demand Progress, pointing to news of a potential Democratic coalition to buck the party’s leadership and support a plan to float businesses’ payrolls through the crisis. “We must make sure that America does not go in the wrong direction and become even more inequitable because we let unemployment soar, compel cities and states to implement austerity, force small businesses to shutter and let large corporations backstopped by the Fed roll them up.”

The tragedy is that we’re already moving in that wrong direction, and chances to change the political dynamic do not come around often. As Barack Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel (now an investment banker and TV talking head) said more than a decade ago during the financial crisis: “Never allow a good crisis to go to waste – it’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible.”

Billionaires and corporations are clearly following that advice, aiming to use the pandemic to grow their wealth and political power in previously unfathomable ways. It would be better if the opposition party put up a real fight – or at least refused to be complicit in postponing progress for yet another generation.

David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and Jacobin editor at large who served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter. He also publishes Too Much Information newsletter.