It was like a breath of fresh air.

Yesterday, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

In the State Capitol building.

Under the dome.

Where more than 1,200 people gathered.

And stood firmly with a simple plan.

Single Payer.

Medicare for all.

If the federal government isn’t going to do it, then the states will.

Led by Pennsylvania.

The activists were sick and tired of a watered down public option.

They were sick and tired of the waffling in Washington.

They want a full blown public option — single payer.

And they want it now.

Former CIGNA exec Wendell Potter tried to defend a watered down public option being pushed in DC.

He was greeted coolly — with a smattering of hisses.

Potter turned visibly emotional in trying to defend Obama and the Democrats.

“Single payer is the ultimate answer,” Potter said. “But we need some solutions right now. We need to get what we can get.”

But the crowd was impatient.

They wanted single payer — now.

And the leaders of the movement for a single payer in Pennsylvania have no time for the talk of a watered down public option.

“We are for a public option,” Senator Jim Ferlo (D-Pittsburgh) told the ramped up crowd. “But the public option is a single payer plan.”

Ferlo said that the federal single payer bill is nine pages.

The Pennsylvania state single payer bill is only 26 pages.

“But in Congress, you have a 1,000-page plus piece of legislation,” Ferlo said. “It is downright gobbledygook. It is gobbledygook because they want to keep you in the dark. They want to dissuade the American people from understanding something basic and simple. We want an expanded and improved Medicare system for all. It’s not rocket science. And if you are a member of Congress and you can’t understand that, then get the hell out of Congress.”

On Sunday in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, Chuck Pennachio, executive director of healthcare4allpa.org, told a small group of single payer activists that what was going in in Congress is “fraudulent activity.”

Yesterday, he said that “all eyes are on Pennsylvania.”

“We have a political opportunity to get this done unlike any other political body in the United States,” Pennacchio said. “We have the commitment of the Governor to sign the bill once it passes. Funding is authorized in the bill. We have the support of Democrats and Republicans.”

Pennacchio said that he had the support of the Republican leadership in the state Senate for a hearing on the single payer bill this year.

Dr. Margaret Flowers, one of the thirteen who were arrested in the Senate Finance Committee earlier this year demanding a hearing in the Senate for single payer, told the crowd in Harrisburg that “single payer medicine is civilized medicine.”

“Why do we allow ourselves to be the only industrialized nation that doesn’t take care of its people?” Flowers asked. “We must not rest until every person in this country gets health care. Everybody in. Nobody out.”

Kevin Zeese is a lead organizer of the nationwide civil disobedience movement targeting health insurance corporations and one of the Baucus 13.

Zeese said that the American people are angry at the Democrats for their “reform” legislation that “will force people to buy from corporations they don’t trust.”

But Zeese said that the politicians won’t make the difference.

“The truth is — they are not the ones who count,” Zeese said. “It wasn’t LBJ who brought civil rights to the United States. It was organized people being persistent in their demands. It was not Woodrow Wilson who gave women the right to vote. It was women demanding the right to vote that gave them the right to vote. And it will not be President Obama that gives us single payer health care. It will be us that gives us single payer health care.”

Zeese called the Democrats health reform proposals “a giveaway of hundreds of millions of dollars a year from working people to the insurance corporations.”

Perhaps the most poignant moment of the two hour rally was a speech by Dr. Dwight Michael.

Michael is a family physician from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

“I was born and raised a conservative Republican in Hanover, Pennsylvania — home of Utz Potato Chips,” Michael said.

“Through my adult life I have espoused most Republican ideas.”

Michael said that one of his patients asked him to read the Pennsylvania single payer bill.

And he did.

“I have traveled in a revealing journey over the last 18 months,” Michael said. “I was increasingly demoralized by the growing meddling of the private health insurance industry in my relationship with my patients.”

Michael said that he found that the Pennsylvania single payer bill would allow us to “stop wasting our time trying to jump over all of the obstacles placed in the way of good care by insurance plans just so the payer can improve its profit.”

“With this bill, we can now focus on — a novel thought — actually taking care of our patients,” Michael said.

Michael then broke into song — singing a riff from the musical 1776 — “does anybody care, does anybody see what we see?”