It's important for health care delivery reform to curb the greed of the health insurance industry. But that's not all. There is other greed in the system. As an article in "The New Yorker," by Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Harvard, pointed out, there is also a significant amount of greed in the health care delivery industry, including from some MD's. Most MD's are not in it for money, but a significant minority is.
The greed of the health insurance industry, in theory at least, can be handled quickly as has been done in several other countries. In Japan for example they are not allowed to make a profit. This one law makes an enormous difference. Without profit, health insurance industries become somewhat more like Medicare; they are more likely to tend to business, instead of trying to keep people out of the system.
It is also important to eliminate profit in the Health Care delivery industry. Health, obviously, like education, should be a basic right for all people and a non-profit enterprise. It should not be a privilege, as some republicans have asserted and as it is now in the US.
This site has had much to say about "my" congressman, Jim Cooper. He actually may not be corrupted by the health insurance industry, but possibly by HCA, a for-profit health delivery system based here in Nashville. It makes enormous, obscene and illegitimate profits. (This company is family owned, and many of them are billionaires now. Bill Frist, possibly one of the poorest of them, has already said he would vote for a health care reform bill, and he was g w bush's favorite choice for majority leader in the senate!)
Laws can take profit out of the system. MD's can work for salary, a competitive salary, and be quite pleased with it. Most MD's who are on the faculty of medical schools (where the highest quality health care is often located) want the USA to go to a non-profit, (competitive) salary-based system. Those MD's who do not wish to work for a salary can set up a private practice, as many european countries have; they then serve the wealthy, which is perfectly ok.
The bulk of my own career was as a(PHD) member of the faculty of a medical school. Most of my colleagues now favor a single payer system (The American Academy of Surgeons came out for it over a decade ago, and they are definitely not the most liberal group of MD's). A friend of mine, an orthopedic surgeon, who is quite conservative, has told me he is totally opposed to the for-profit operations in health care delivery such as HCA.
So, a public option is important, certainly. But it may be more important just to remove profit from the system.