If you haven't read "Bait and Switch: How The "Public Option” Was Sold," you need to right here

http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/07/20/bait-and-switch-how-the-%e2%80%9cpublic-option%e2%80%9d-was-sold/

by Kip Sullivan

The people who brought us the “public option” began their campaign promising one thing but now promote something entirely different. To make matters worse, they have not told the public they have backpedalled. The campaign for the “public option” resembles the classic bait-and-switch scam: tell your customers you’ve got one thing for sale when in fact you’re selling something very different.

When the “public option” campaign began, its leaders promoted a huge “Medicare-like” program that would enroll about 130 million people. Such a program would dwarf even Medicare, which, with its 45 million enrollees, is the nation’s largest health insurer, public or private. But today “public option” advocates sing the praises of tiny “public options” contained in congressional legislation sponsored by leading Democrats that bear no resemblance to the original model.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the “public options” described in the Democrats’ legislation might enroll 10 million people and will have virtually no effect on health care costs, which means the “public options” cannot, by themselves, have any effect on the number of uninsured. But the leaders of the “public option” movement haven’t told the public they have abandoned their original vision. It’s high time they did.

The bait

“Public option” refers to a proposal, as Timothy Noah put it, “dreamed up” by Jacob Hacker when Hacker was still a graduate student working on a degree in political science. In two papers, one published in 2001 and the second in 2007, Hacker, now a professor of political science at Berkeley, proposed that Congress create an enormous “Medicare-like” program that would sell health insurance to the non-elderly in competition with the 1,000 to 1,500 health insurance companies that sell insurance today.
(more at url)
http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/07/20/bait-and-switch-how-the-%e2%80%9cpublic-option%e2%80%9d-was-sold/

"From the point of view of people who really want to get our population better healthcare and who have not been purchased by insurance, drug, and hospital companies, lobbying for Yes votes on single-payer AND lobbying to leave the states language in the non-single-payer bill (or at least allow a vote on it) seems to make a lot of sense. We're saying that we want single-payer nationally, but that if they won't give it to us right away, we at least want states to be left free to lead the way. Canada arrived at its system after a province led the way...

For those lobbying directly for a public option, it also makes perfect sense to demand freedom for states to do better faster. If the goal is providing more people with better healthcare, if the goal is not to avoid making the federal government look second best, if the goal is not to achieve a perverse hyper-simplicity of "messaging," then including the state single-payer language in August demands is the way to go.

Does mentioning allowing states to do single-payer subtract from demanding that the nation do it? I can't see how.

Does avoiding the topic risk tossing aside our best chance at advancing the cause? Absolutely."


Emphasis mine - m4ac -