Congratulations, town hall patriots, your reasoned debate against health care reform seems to be working: over the weekend members of the Obama administration backed away from their commitment to a government-run health insurance plan, also known as the "public option" or "giving Nancy Pelosi a license to practice Socialized medicine"…

Both Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said on Sunday talk shows that a government insurance option was not essential — one day after President Obama himself said as much.

Absent a public option, Congress is likely to focus on insurance co-ops and exchanges to cover the nation's 46 million uninsured and to control rising healthcare costs. Under one such system in discussion, all uninsured Americans would be required to buy insurance, with poor consumers receiving government subsidies.

In other words, instead of creating a plan to compete with the private health insurance industry, which helped create the health care crisis in the first place, the government will simply have us pour billions of dollars into the private health insurance industry. Genius!

Republicans, of course, are thrilled with this victory for the free market. And I'm sure their next move will be to commission a fleet of time-traveling DeLoreans, so they can zip back to 2008 and be retroactively thrilled about the decision to solve the economic crisis by pouring billions of dollars into the banking industry, which helped create the economic crisis in the first place. Genius!