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If insurers do not deliver health care to consumers at a price they can afford, many Democrats will renew their push for a government-run health plan, or public option, to compete with private insurers.

Fighting for this bill is good policy and good politics. A recent Greenberg/Mark McKinnon poll found that voters support the Fair Elections Now Act by a 2-1 margin, 62 percent to 31 percent. Independents support it 67 percent to 30 percent. Is there a candidate in the country who wouldn't gain votes by saying, "I want a political system in which someone who doesn't take more than $100 from anybody can run a competitive race for Congress. I want a political process that makes Congress listen to their constituents and allows them to ignore the lobbyists with fat checks in hand"?

Now that the Senate Democratic leadership has stripped the last vestige of the public option — the Medicare buy-in provision — from its bill, progressives are feeling doubly betrayed.

From the very beginning of this debate, progressives have argued that a public option or a Medicare buy-in would restore competition and hold the private health insurance industry accountable. Progressives understood that a public plan would give Americans real choices about what kind of system they wanted to be in and how they wanted to spend their money. Yet Washington has decided, once again, that the American people cannot be trusted to choose for themselves. Your money goes to insurers, whether or not you want it to.

The Medicare buy-in proposal represented a drastically scaled-back version of the original public option and was envisioned as offering coverage to individuals between the ages of 55 and 64 who do not have access to employer benefits. Reid and senior White House officials were prepared to narrow the framework of the plan, essentially walling it off from the Medicare program while vastly reducing the pool of potential beneficiaries.

Reid's original inclination was to leave the public option out of a final bill he is writing from measures passed by the finance and health committees. But his liberal colleagues began urging him two weeks ago to reconsider, after insurance industry forecasts that premiums would rise sharply under the Finance Committee bill, which lacked a public option. The report had the effect of prodding Democrats to look for better ways to control costs, and the public option -- strongly opposed by the insurance industry -- reemerged as a possible solution.

On the issue that has been perhaps the most pronounced flash point in the national debate, 57 percent of all Americans now favor a public insurance option, while 40 percent oppose it. Support has risen since mid-August, when a bare majority, 52 percent, said they favored it. (In a June Post-ABC poll, support was 62 percent.)

If a public plan were run by the states and available only to those who lack affordable private options, support for it jumps to 76 percent. Under those circumstances, even a majority of Republicans, 56 percent, would be in favor of it, about double their level of support without such a limitation.

Senator Sanders said the debate Thursday “went up a few decibels higher than it usually does in caucus meetings.” He said he had told Mr. Baucus that more than 60 percent of the public and more than 80 percent of Democrats supported creation of a public insurance plan. “It’s difficult to understand why we can’t give the American people what they want,” Mr. Sanders said.

In a late-summer poll by Survey USA, 77 percent of Americans supported a public health care option. Is anybody in Washington listening?

Who is speaking for the people against these wealthy and entrenched interests? Their fear-mongering and selfish blocking of health care reform will, if successful, lead to continued health-cost inflation, ultimately crippling all aspects of the economy. Robert M. Gordon

WASHINGTON - Despite months of outward ambivalence about creating a government health insurance plan, the Obama White House has launched an intensifying behind-the-scenes campaign to get divided Senate Democrats to take up some version of the idea for a final vote in the coming weeks.