Nancy Pelosi says no way a health care reform bill gets through the House w/o a public option. I guess that’s the best we can hope for at this point, though I still have real doubts – especially about the Senate. If the Senate passes a bill with no public component, the House version can be stripped in the conference committee. Hopefully the Progressive caucus will keep that from happening. Assuming some version of a public plan makes it to Obama’s desk, the big issue will be what this “public option” looks like.

Combined with a mandate to purchase insurance, a crappy public component will provide no competition to the insurance industry vultures, and no incentive to lower costs and improve care. But, we’ll see. Even though more than 3/4 of “We the People” are in favor of having the choice of a public option, there’s still an awful lot of stupid to overcome. For instance, Michelle Bachmann wants Obama to keep his hands off her body (Michelle, honey – he’s just not that in to you). And the President doesn’t seem to realize that his attempts to compromise with people who will never do more than stab you in the back at the end of the day is only making us less confident in his ability to get things done.

That’s been the big surprise for me. Not that I thought he was a bleeding heart liberal, but that his well-oiled political machine has been so stunningly incompetent when it comes to health care reform. He set himself up to fail right at the start, and it only got worse from there.

The Obama administration should have been pushing for single payer. If you want to fall back on “public option” later, well, OK, that’s how the sausages are made. But when you that off the table from the start, you screw yourself. And us.

Let’s hope the House progressives can shame him into doing what’s right.