On Time magazine’s Swampland blog, Karen Tumulty notices something buried in the results of the latest NBC-Wall Street Journal opinion poll — Americans overwhelmingly support the inclusion of a public option in any health care reform package:

34a. In any health care proposal, how important do you feel it is to give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance—extremely important, quite important, not that important, or not at all important?

Extremely important …………………….. 41[% of respondents]
Quite important …………………………… 35[%]
Not that important ……………………….. 12[%]
Not at all important ……………………… 8[%]
Not sure …………………………………… 4[%]

That’s 76% of respondents who believe it’s important to include a public option — an overwhelming mandate. So what is a public option?

A “public option” would be a government-provided insurance plan that would be available to any American who wanted to use it. It wouldn’t replace private insurance plans (despite what Frank Luntz’s poll-driven scare tactics would have you believe); you could keep your private insurance if you preferred it to the government plan. But it would give an option to millions of Americans who are either uninsured or underinsured under today’s private insurance system, and introduce competition where no competition currently exists, in areas where one private insurance company has bought or bullied its way to a monopoly.

Which is why President Barack Obama supports a public option. He explained why in a town hall meeting held a few days ago in Green Bay, Wisconsin:

What we’re working on is the creation of something called the Health Insurance Exchange, which would allow you to one-stop shop for a health care plan, compare benefits and prices, choose the plan that’s best for you. If you’re happy with your plan, you keep it. None of these plans, though, would be able to deny coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions.

Every plan should include an affordable, basic benefits package. And if you can’t afford one of these plans, we should provide assistance to make sure that you can. I also strongly believe that one of the options in the Exchange should be a public insurance option. And the reason is not because we want a government takeover of health care — I’ve already said if you’ve got a private plan that works for you, that’s great. But we want some competition. If the private insurance companies have to compete with a public option, it’ll keep them honest and it’ll help keep their prices down.

So on one side of this debate we have President Obama and three-quarters of the American people. But who’s on the other side? Insurance companies, which are worried that a public option might force them to actually have to start competing in the marketplace, and are responding with scare tactics of their own:

Blue Cross of North Carolina decided to jump the gun on President Obama and Congress and start running television ads telling people how awful a public health care plan would be. According to the ads, people enrolled in the public health care plan wouldn’t have a choice of doctors, would face long waiting periods for appointments and procedures and would not even be able to get a clerk to answer questions on billing.

That sounds pretty awful, but if it were true, you have to wonder why Blue Cross of North Carolina is so worried. After all, President Obama is not proposing that anyone would be forced to join a public plan. He just proposed that people have the option to buy into a public plan. Is Blue Cross of North Carolina really that terrified that it will be unable to compete with a public plan that doesn’t let patients choose their doctor, subjects them to long waits and doesn’t answer questions about billing?

See, that’s the thing about competition. If a public plan isn’t good for the people who choose it — if it forces you into long waits to see a doctor, or buries you under paperwork, or doesn’t cover procedures people need — then it won’t be competitive. Anyone who can will simply take private insurance instead.

What the insurance industry is afraid of isn’t that a public option won’t be good. They’re afraid that it will be good — so good that they will have to cut into their legendary profit margins and huge CEO salaries to compete with it.

Which is why it’s disappointing to see Tom Daschle fold under the insurance lobby’s pressure:

In an attempt at bipartisanship, three former majority leaders of the U.S. Senate, Tom Daschle, Howard Baker, and Bob Dole, offered their solution today to the biggest obstacle to achieving health care reform — a public option.

“While I feel very strongly that consumers should have the choice of a national, Medicare-like plan, my colleagues do not… But we were concerned that the ongoing health reform debate is beginning to show signs of fracture on the public plan issue, so in order to advance the process of developing bipartisan legislation and to move it forward, it’s time to find consensus here,” Daschle said.

“We’ve come too far and gained too much momentum for our efforts to fail over disagreements on one single issue,” he said.

When one side of a “disagreement” is three-quarters of the American people, and the other one is the plutocrats of the insurance industry, I’m not sure why the “solution” is to just give the plutocrats what they want.

An overwhelming majority of Americans want a public option for health insurance coverage. They should get it.

(Want to take action to stand up for a public option? Join with 350,000 other Americans in standing up with Dr. Howard Dean to defend it.)