It's a little offtopic, but this reminds me of Lessig's "the corrupting influence of money is the first problem facing this nation. That unless we solve this problem, we won’t solve anything else."
In my opinion the public option wouldn't have cost us much as a nation on the whole, and could have possibly worked out to great advantage, but was not going to happen because health insurance companies are too powerful for that sort of thing to get through.