n Washington, "health care reform" has degenerated into a sick joke. At this point, only spinners who've succumbed to their own vertigo could use the word "robust" to describe the public option in the health care bill that the House Democratic leadership has sent to the floor. "A main argument was that a public plan would save people money," The New York Times has noted. But the insurance industry - claiming to want a level playing field - has gotten the Obama administration to bulldoze the plan. "After House Democratic leaders unveiled their health care bill [on October 29], the Congressional Budget Office said the public plan would cost more than private plans and only 6 million people would sign up." At its best, "the public option" was a weak remedy for the disastrous ailments of the health care system in the United States. But whatever virtues the public option may have offered were stripped from the bill en route to the House floor. What remains is a Rube Goldberg contraption that will launch this country into a new phase of health care apartheid.