The Senate Finance Committee formally rejected the public option’s entry into its bill on Tuesday, giving many employers and insurance professionals a sigh of relief. But is the public option really dead?

Perhaps not, says Mike Thompson, a principal and NYC health care practice leader for the PricewaterhouseCoopers Human Resource Services division.  It may revive itself in some form before a solidified bill makes its way to the President’s desk.

For now, Thompson argues, defeat of the public option in Senate Finance removes a giant roadblock, enabling health reform to get back on track.

“This [rejection of the public option] will enable the health care debate to go on. If the public option had remained in all the bills, I think you would have seen an evaporation of support from a lot of constituencies. I don’t think that it’s dead in the sense that they still need to reconcile the bills between the Senate and the House. It’s unlikely that the public option will be included in its entirety, but if it does re-arise it will probably be in the form of some sort of trigger,” he prophesizes.

Many employers worried that the public option would expose them to provider cost-shifting. A trigger plan could still activate those concerns, with an uncertain effect on overall cost savings. At this juncture there’s no consensus among Democrats, making a middle-of-the-road reform package likely to emerge in the long run, says Thompson.

“Most of the discussion has been around providing access and then finding a way to pay for access for individuals and small groups. The public option has been somewhat of a distraction in that discussion because it was a deal breaker for many constituents. Essentially, if it had been part of the legislation it would have derailed health care reform in its entirety,” he states.

Now that the public option, the meat of the debate, is off the table (though a trigger plan and related ideas such as a co-op option remain) conclusive reform may follow. At least now legislators, policy action groups, and employer groups can begin to wrestle with what’s left of the cow: finding people access and paying for that access. Clearly not the end of the health care reform discussion, the debate rages on around Cadillac plans and assessments on the insurance industry.

“Congress is trying to thread the needle, but it’s a very difficult equation to solve,” concludes Thompson. He adds that he wouldn’t be surprised if we witnessed “a few more right turns” from Congress before all is said and done.