There are two objections to the public option. One, of course, is that it will undermine corporations and lead eventually to a single-payer system. If the public option becomes a reality, then health-care-for-profit is probably doomed.

Too true.

The other object, which has too much basis in reality, is that it would be a government-run program. Despite the failure of the private sector in the past eight years, there are still millions of Americans who simply do not trust the government. I'm not talking about the paranoids who are convinced Obama is preparing to take away everyone's guns and lock us all up in re-education camps run the by UN. No, I'm talking about a more reasonable perspective that is summed up in the simple question:

"What has the government done well?"

We look at all government gets wrong, and that question rings loud and seemingly true. From bureaucracies that frustrate individual initiative to bureaucracies that cannot take two steps without tripping over their own feet, government seems defined by incompetence. What, indeed, has the federal government done well, well enough that we should trust it with something as huge as the proposal for the public option?

Well, for one thing: the Republic still stands. Compare what has happened in the rest of the world since the Constitution was ratified in 1783. Yes, we had our own massive trial in the Civil War, but following the defeat of the Confederacy, the nation was restored and that division, in terms of what led to that war, has been, for the most part, erased. Two world wars and a great depression, tumults that were global in scale, did not overthrow our constitutional form of government. Few other nations can make that claim (our two greatest allies are among them: Great Britain and Canada).

Nations collapse because of failure of government (among other things). Whatever the failures of American government, what it did right has proven even stronger. And since the presidency of FDR, where government finally began to look after the welfare of poor, elderly and otherwise non-powerful Americans, government has made failure even less possible. Yes, bureaucracy has increased tremendously. So have the quality of life for most Americans. The two are connected, and the connection is not accidental.

Any form of health care run by the government, whether it's the so-called public option or anything else, can be an absolute disaster along the lines of what Bush did with FEMA. Or it could be a massive success, as Medicare has proven itself to be. That outcome is not determined by whether or not government is involved. Government is merely a vehicle, and what matters most with any vehicle is how it's constructed and how it's driven. And in the case of health care, the most vital component of any program is going to be how involved ordinary citizens are.

Democratic government is, after all, the property of citizens. Government failures have occurred not through the involvement of citizens but their neglect of government. In the orgy of fear following 9/11, too many Americans were willing to let Bush and his cronies run the government as they pleased. As a result we got Iraq, Katrina and the current economic disaster. With the huge swell of activism in politics over the past few years, culminating in the election of Barack Obama, Congress and other elected officials are paying more attention to what citizens are demanding.

And what citizens are demanding is health care they can afford. We may not get it; the power of lobbyists and the entrenched monied interests is huge. Fear is being used to attack plans that include a public option, and as a result, we face the real possibility that we'll get health care "reform" that doesn't even rise to the level of half-assed.

The only way to ensure this does not happen, of course, is for citizens to remind Congress who is in charge of the government. If American voters raise their voices and demand change that is authentic, then we have a chance. And if the American people simple remind themselves of all the good things their government does do for them — and only the paranoid and dishonest will fail to admit these are vital, meaningful things — then they will step forward, demand that government act once again on their behalf and do their right thing.

For them. Not the corporations.