I will feel bad for people living in states that opt out of a public insurance option. However it won't help them one bit if people in NO states are given the choice of a public option instead. Understand that I write this as someone who strongly supports establishing a Single Payer, or Medicare for All, public health insurance system in America; NOW. Sure I support that, but I also know that there isn't a prayer of a chance of making that happen, not now.
Call the system unfair, call the game rigged, unless someone has the power to change that system or nullify that game it will be go on being played under the rules in effect. I am not a defeatist, I am a fighter, and mine has been one small voice among many pushing the fight forward in the current session of Congress. I have witnessed our ability to move a mountain, against all seeming insider odds, to keep some form of a public option alive, to expose and reject the false promise of a "trigger to nowhere" being offered us as a sleeping pill instead. Our power is real. And so is the mountain. Our ability to move it slightly helped crack the aura of it's permanent invincibility. But that mountain is still there, pushed a few yards further down the road.
We weren't going to get Single Payer out of the players currently residing in Washington, and for several months it's been clear we weren't going to get a public option available to all in all 50 States either. We were going to get a mere fig leaf of a nod in our direction, a promise to look again at setting up some type of Public Option somewhere much further down the road, but we made the mountain move instead. And I'm proud of that, because though I may be an idealist I'm a realist also. I know how hard we pushed, and I felt the resistance to our movement. We pushed hard and they had to give, a little.
Some think what we just accomplished is insignificant, but I know that's not true. I know because if what we just won truly was insignificant, they would gladly have thrown it to us early in the game, to confuse, distract, and divide us if nothing else. But the vast gray Center Right that holds power in America today instead chose not to do that. We made them do it anyway. The entire Republican Party united against the Public Option, and a quarter of our elected Democrats were always with them in spirit, looking for some way to protect the private insurance monopoly in America. If the plan Harry Reid now plans to introduce in the Senate bore no threat to that monopoly, it would not have been so fiercely resisted.
Our adversaries are terrified of a camel's nose, because the walls of the tent that they occupy are very thin, and the inequities that it defends are so grievous. Not all tents that camels get their noses under collapse, but many of them do. So they did all they could do to keep it out, but we are shoving it under there anyway. The liberation of Europe in World War II began with the liberation of a beachhead in Normandy. The war goes on and people still do and will continue to suffer, but we just won an important battle, and the Right knows it.