Yeah, and?

OK, so we're somehow surprised?

The "public option" in health care has been so watered down and so restricted that it's mostly only going to be available to the unprofitable people... and now the CBO comes back and says "It's going to cost more than current premiums to support", and anti-reform people are crowing that this proves it was a stupid idea to begin with.

So let's look at an analogy.

Let's consider when Sam Walton was starting Wal*Mart. He's got a good idea, and he sees the inefficiencies of the little, locally owned stores, and he says "I think I can take some of the inefficiency out of the system and thereby sell products more cheaply."

Now, let's imagine there was a powerful lobby group for the Mom and Pop shops. These lobbyists have given large amounts of money to a significant number of congressional leaders, and fed them the line that this new lower pricing is somehow bad for America. And they manage to work in regulation with Sam Walton that significantly reduces his ability to leverage his bulk purchasing into lower costs. And the Mom & Pop shops don't want to lose any paying customers, so another regulation is put into place that the new Wal*Mart stores will only be available to the poor and those who have been convicted of shoplifting, the people who don't really have access to the regular stores. And then, because that STILL feels to someone like too great a risk of competition, more regulation is added that says states can opt out of having Wal*Mart stores at all, so some states may just refuse to allow the stores in at all.

Do you think Wal*Mart would have been successful at that point? Oh, and by the way, we also pass a law at the same time that REQUIRES everyone to purchase certain goods that are only available from the Mom & Pop shops and from Wal*Mart (but again, from Wal*Mart only to the "undesirable" customer base).

And to top it all off, you don't even have any cost controls at all on the Mom & Pop shops, so while they're about to be handed a much larger customer base (from which they can skim the cream and leave the undesirables to the new Wal*Mart stores), they've also managed to convince a lot of people that this new legislation is somehow going to hurt them, so they're going to jack up their already high prices even higher. And why not, they have a legacy anti-trust exemption, so in some states, they're really the only game in town. No real competition, mandated customers, why the hell wouldn't they raise their prices insanely?

The Public Option isn't failing because it's a bad idea, it's failing because it's been so watered down by Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats as to become a joke.