You prefer a public option because you have never been to a Western country with public healthcare and tried to obtain emergency medical care. I have. I was in an overcrowded waiting room for 12 hours and watched one person die as they rushed him past me and around the corner. The whole character set and scene was extremely grim. There was ONE ER doctor on duty at night. Contrast that to the US where I received prompt emergency care and was only charged a couple hundred dollars which were eventually dropped because I qualified for their compassionate care write off since I make under a certain amount. Childcare hospital facility expenses (~$3000) were also written off each delivery because of the income qualification (400% of poverty line + household size factor in). The office of the doctor they contracted for the delivery stiffed me hard in my wife's third birth, but I am on a $100 a month payment plan for 12 months to pay it off. Considering the far better state of healthcare in the US than the extremely grim hospital scene I took part in the capital city of a Western European country, compounded with the discussions I had with the various characters I meet in the ER treatment waiting area, I can fully appreciate the disastrous effects public healthcare has. I'd rather fight a $50,000 bill than to go through the wringer again aka the public hospital. Coincidentally my grandmother died shortly after she there a few years after my incident. She slipped and fell on the front steps; they sent her home after a 5 minute cursory evaluation and she ended up dying from awful complications a few tens of hours later. Not to mention you have to actually pull strings with bribes to be seen sooner than 6+ months out for basic diagnostics or procedures. Each evaluation and treatment step is a wait of 6+ months.