Jon Walker reports that access to the public option and the exchange will be universal within five years.
In theory, by 2015 all employers, and therefore all Americans not on Medicare or Medicaid, could start using the new health insurance exchange for health care. This would give nearly everyone the ability to choose the public option if they wanted.
Of course it's not available to everyone right away, but it's much more rapid than the phase-in on the Senate side. Though it's unclear whether employees would be able to split from their employer-based plan in order to choose the public option. But that's what it looks like.