The Wall Street Journal reports today:

The reason left-flank Democrats are so adamant about a public option is because they know it is an opening wedge for the government to dominate U.S. health care. That’s also why the health-care industry, business groups, some moderates and most Republicans are opposed. Team Obama likes the policies of the first group but wants the political support of the second. And they’re trying to solve this Newtonian problem — irresistible forces, immovable objects — by becoming less and less candid about the changes they really favor.

A rhetorical gong Mr. Obama has been banging a lot lately is the idea that the people pointing all this out are liars. ‘When you hear the naysayers claim that I’m trying to bring about government-run health care,’ he said in one speech, ‘know this: They’re not telling the truth.’ He adds that opposition to a public option isn’t ‘based on any evidence’ and that it is ‘illegitimate’ to argue that his program is ‘is somehow a Trojan horse for a single-payer system.’

So much for changing the political tone. Perhaps the President should check in with his more honest liberal allies. Jacob Hacker, now a professor of political science at Berkeley, came up with the intellectual architecture for the public option when he was a graduate student in the 1990s. ‘Someone once said to me, “This is a Trojan horse for single payer,” and I said, “Well, it’s not a Trojan horse, right? It’s just right there,”‘ Mr. Hacker explained in a speech last year. ‘I’m telling you, we’re going to get there, over time, slowly.'”

The WSJ is 100% correct: the public option is a Trojan Horse for single-payer health care. We are very familiar with Hacker’s stealth plan for single-payer and are well aware that President Obama has adopted it.

Don’t believe us?

Here is the Washington Post’s blogger Ezra Klein admitting the exact same thing: “They have a sneaky strategy the point of which is to put in place something that over time the natural incentives within its own market will move it to single payer.”

Here is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman admitting the same thing: “…the only reason not to do [single-payer] is that politically it’s hard to do in one step…You’d have to convince people to completely give up the insurance they have, whereas something that let’s people keep the insurance they have but then offers the option of a public plan, that may evolve into single-payer, but you can do it politically…”

The public option is is single-payer health care by stealth. It is time the President was honest with the American people and admitted it.