Merits of the public option

Obama et al. have taken some criticism from the left for pursuing "weak" health-care reform.
Some say the "public option" isn't good enough when other countries have single-payer systems that work well.
While I sympathize with their cause, I say these people ought to ease off on the criticism. Public option may well be the best course for the U.S. right now.
Here's why.
A single-payer system would be extremely difficult to implement in a country of 300 million that has never had anything like it.
The big players who are resisting the public option now would fight against going single-payer even harder. They would play the anti-government passions of half the U.S. population like Yo-Yo Ma playing a cello.
Even if the battle were won, it might well be a pyrrhic victory followed by one of the biggest, most daunting government undertakings in U.S. history.
But it seems that a good public option, not watered down to please the Blue Dogs or whatever "reasonable" Republicans there are, could achieve the basic objectives of health-care reform: health insurance for all, and cost reduction.
It would give the uninsured an option, and as a major player with tens of millions of policy holders the government would force the private sector to find efficiencies. In the end, health care would be available to more people and eat up less of the GDP.
In short, a good public option could make the health-care system more civilized and more efficient. Those would be big victories for the public good.
One way in which you could say I'm conservative is that I generally prefer to see change come at a slow pace. Or at least I'm averse to really fast change. Too much change at once can mean instability, because a system can adjust to only so much at a time.
So I say cut Obama some slack on this issue. Fight for the change that's possible now. Maybe you could think of this as the first stage in transforming the system.