WASHINGTON (Compiled from (PAI) – President Obama has seemingly wavered back and forth, and back again in recent weeks in his public support for the public option in the nation’s health care debate.

The public option is a government-run health care alternative designed to create competition with health insurance companies that proponents say would lower costs. Obama backed away from previous statements and said that publicly funded health insurance was “only a sliver,” and not the main focus of his health care reform plan.

His comments – as well as teetering by conservative Democratic lawmakers on the same issue  came on the heels of raucous town hall debates, with some protestors decrying any federal involvement in health care. That backsliding will come at a political price from unions, said Rich Trumka, the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO and the heir apparent to the presidency of the AFL-CIO (the election is next month).

Press Associates reported “In recent interviews with Politico and Huffington Post, the federation’s 60-year-old secretary-treasurer has warned politicians in no uncertain terms not to take labor for granted, especially if pols backtrack on two key issues: Health care and workers’ rights. Trumka said labor would virtually abandon lawmakers who don’t support health care reform that doesn’t include the public option.”

“We’re also going to keep politicians strong,” Trumka said, “so that they don’t listen to the moneymen and continue to erode away or negotiate away a program” and it “ultimately becomes useless. Right now, without a public option, reform becomes useless. It won’t change the current system.”

Retiring AFL-CIO President John Sweeney is urging Obama and Congress to hold fast.  In an Aug. 17 statement, he declared, “A quality public health insurance option is a crucial part of health care reform to keep private insurance companies honest, hold down costs and ensure everybody has a health care choice available…The only way to force real competition on the insurance companies is a strong public plan option.  The usual suspects opposed to reform are trying to hijack the process and attacking the public health insurance plan option because they are afraid of competition and want to keep gouging working families.  Unless we take decisive steps to stop the crippling rise of health costs, we will have squandered this opportunity.”

While the AFL-CIO has supported and actively campaigned for health care reform legislation based on the principles of universality, cost controls, choosing your own doctor and a government-run alternative to the insurance companies, 552 labor bodies – from international unions down to local councils – want to go in a different direction: a government-run “single-payer” Medicare-like system.

The AFL-CIO Executive Council has not acted on the single-payer question, but a fight could be brewing on the convention floor of the labor federation’s national convention next month. No less than 40 resolutions supporting a single-payer system have been submitted for approval by AFL-CIO delegates.

While single-payer backers fight for their cause at the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh, and cite opinion polls nationwide showing majority support for such a change, they face obstacles:

* Congress.  The key Senate Finance Committee, charged with finding $1 trillion needed over 10 years to expand coverage to all, is lukewarm at best to even the “fall-back” public option.  Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., one of several moderate “Blue Dog” Democrats, is dead set against single-payer.

*Anti-health care hysteria whipped up by the insurance companies, the Radical Right and Republicans.  The frenzy has gotten so insane that an effigy of one moderate Democratic congressman from Maryland was hung outside his district office, the district office sign of a second moderate from Georgia was spray-painted with a swastika, and a third moderate Democrat, from North Carolina, received telephoned death threats.

*Obama.  He told a pro-health care reform crowd in New Hampshire on Aug. 11 that single-payer would not pass. Later that week, he backtracked, and then he sought to clarify his backtracking.

“The White House is almost back to Square One,” Politico reported last week, “struggling to break through with a message that has undergone several major course-corrections and on the defensive against wild charges that caught Democrats off-guard.”