Watch for the ambush! The big fight over ObamaCare is far from finished.

By The Wall Street Journal

So it looks as if the public option has been sent to the death panel—so to speak. Over the weekend President Obama and other White House officials throttled back their demands for a new health-care entitlement program that looked like Medicare for the middle class. Liberals are in a furor and more than a few conservatives are popping champagne corks. But dumping one of the most radical and destructive features of ObamaCare is best viewed as a tactical political retreat, not a surrender.

The Administration had to toss something overboard, considering the rising swell of voter opposition and the fact that many Democrats are getting queasy in the current health-care squall, especially in the Senate. Jettisoning the public option is supposed to quiet the public's main worry about government control of medical decision-making—not to mention neutralizing the insurance industry's main objection. The issue now is whether Mr. Obama's fall-back is merely to pass the public option on the installment plan.

There are plenty of other ways of "getting there" without a public option—namely, through the federally chartered insurance cooperatives now gathering momentum in the Senate........ "We're going to have some type of public option, call it 'co-op,' call it what you want," Mr. Reid said in July. From the start, the Administration has always held that "the goal is non-negotiable; the path is," as Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel put it...........

Another path may be to convert private insurance companies into public utilities outright. In a New York Times op-ed on Sunday, Mr. Obama reiterated his plan to regulate who the insurers must cover, how generous the benefits must be and how much they can charge, including a limit on out-of-pocket spending. If Democrats decide to centrally plan the insurance market, in what sense is that different from a public option?......

The Democratic walk-back on the public option is just a few steps. This fight is a long way from over.

Read the whole article here....