Andrew Coates:

The proposal has come straight from the insurance industry: criminalize the uninsured and subsidize unaffordable private insurance premiums with public funds

Oh, and there's a massive takedown of RomneyCare:

The state purchased health insurance for everyone with incomes below 150% of the federal poverty level and subsidized those making between 150% and 300% of that level. A new state agency, the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector, was established to match individuals to private insurance plans.

The Connector employs more state workers to assist with the purchase of private health insurance than the province of Ontario’s Medicare employs. Canada’s Medicare is the agency that pays for all necessary medical services for all residents. Ontario’s population (13 million) is twice that of Massachusetts. Canada’s Medicare overhead costs 1.3% of health spending. In Massachusetts the Insurance Connector adds 4.5% in administrative cost to each policy it brokers.

The Massachusetts reform went into effect in 2007. As of March 2008, 40% of those uninsured in 2007 remained without coverage. High-deductible policies lowered premium costs by shifting more of the expense onto individuals. Physicians for a National Health Program found that a healthy 43 year-old man making just over $31,000 a year would have to pay $5,096 before any insurance coverage kicks in, with additional co-pay and co-insurance costs.

In Massachusetts when you lose your job you still lose your health insurance, the reform does not protect you from financial ruin when illness strikes, and health insurance remains far too expensive.

And a massive take-down "public option" in the state of Maine:

The “public option” refers to an idea that people and employers should be allowed to purchase insurance from a public program along the lines of Medicare. Proponents believe this would pressure the entire insurance market to reform itself.

On moral grounds, supporters of the public option advance arguments similar to single payer proponents: Insurer profits amount to blood money, for every penny earned by the company is a penny’s worth of care cheated from the effort to make a human being healthy. In comparison a public program with the lowest possible overhead, its finances open for scrutiny, presents a morally defensible means of paying for care.

But the public option amounts to a moral posture, not a workable reform. Single payer would eliminate the insurance industry from health care, a “public option” cannot. A “public option” won’t liberate the resources squandered by the private insurance companies. Instead it adds duplicative waste in administrative overhead to the system.

The most relevant evidence comes from the state of Maine. Maine has offered a “public option” since 2003. In six years this program has managed to cover only 10% of the uninsured and has not forced its competitors to lower costs.

Perhaps the idea of a “public option,” as a clever market-based scheme, reveals something about popular ideological illusions, for it relies upon a crude kind of “free markets equal low costs plus high quality.” Of course this is not the way the market works. The laws of the health insurance market, in particular, dictate that the successful competitor will avoid insuring people who are sick and/or poor while recruiting customers who are healthy and wealthy.

Does it really make sense to believe that a “public option” tossed amid the heavily monopolized insurance market in the U.S. would stand a chance at competing for the healthy and wealthy patients? In the best case scenario, wouldn’t such a program instead drive the system toward officially sanctioned disparities in care?

And if anybody thinks that the "little single payer advocates" are going to go away, think again:

Single-payer national health insurance, after more than 20 years of accumulating evidence, now accumulates unprecedented popular support. Although polls have shown for decades that a majority, including physicians, favor national health insurance, the depth and passion of grassroots activism for the proposal is something new. For the first time this fall single payer may be voted on on the floor of the House of Representatives.

At the end of July, as the Energy & Commerce committee completed deliberations on HR 3200, Representative Anthony Weiner of New York, with 6 others, put forward an amendment to replace the text of HR 3200 with the text of HR 676. Committee Chair Waxman interrupted to say that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered to allow single payer to be voted on by the entire House of Representatives if the amendment were withdrawn from Committee. Weiner accepted.

Perhaps the prospect of defeating single payer on the floor of the House of Representatives seems, to the Democratic Party leadership, a way to at last get single payer off the table.

Single payer activists have welcomed this turn of events, for it was the direct fruit of grassroots mobilization. The proposals before Congress, with the exception of HR 676 and S 703, will simply not work. Whatever happens in Congress this fall, the system will grow more dysfunctional. And with expectations for fundamental reform now raised even higher, excellent prospects to build a movement for single-payer national health insurance will persist.