As I wrote yesterday, the public option is mandatory for more than just cost-control and competition purposes. If there are individual mandates and no public option, we would be required by law to finance the private insurance mafia. This is unacceptable.
While he's being a little harder on the president than I am, Wendell Potter certainly seems to understand why the public option is so crucial:
Not only is Obama clearly ready to throw the public option overboard, he is embracing the requirement that we all be forced to buy insurance from private insurers. That means your tax dollars and mine will be used to pay subsidies to the big insurers to provide coverage to people who can't afford to buy their policies, because the big insurers charge far more than they should because Wall Street investors demand that they do.
The healthcare reform bill(s) could reduce private insurance premiums to a dollar a month, but that's still a dollar being fed into an inherently corrupt and worthless system.