To be fair, however, many things sound like "good ideas" until you try and implement them... It's difficult for people to consider all the long-term implication

To be fair, however, many things sound like "good ideas" until you try and implement them... It's difficult for people to consider all the long-term implications of such a change in health system, and dangerously easy to gloss over what may seem like small minutiae, but ends up meaning the difference between life and death for people. In the end, "public option" is just a set of words that could be used to describe any number of systems ranging from ideal to unbearable, and so it is not of any positive or negative value in itself. The devil is in the details.