the usa should create a medicaid public option

I haven't kept up with what's been going on in healthcare as of late.  But i think Trump through deregulation etc has begun to lower costs.  Do you know or remember the specifics of what has been done and what is being proposed etc?  Perhaps with more deregulation and allowing people to form their own groups, co-ops for better large group rates would make more sense as that could be done with far less hassle and government involvement.  Have you see the new ads for the company that is offering testing via mail?  This is another avenue which should be deregulated and would decrease costs.  There's really no reason you shouldn't be able to go to the store and buy a strep or flu test and do it at home.  At one time you couldn't do at home pregnancy tests.  You can or could before get a test strip to check your urine for infection at home.  While e-visits are a thing they aren't promoted or readily available.  In other words there's plenty that can be done to enable and empower people to take control of their own health care w/o involving tax payer funds or government.  This is the path we should explore.  For the more serious conditions an aflack or catastrophic plan should be available, but I'm not sure how you bring those back after the ACA did away with them, talk about stupid and short sighed.

A public option is pretty much an infinitely smarter system to utilize for the US Healthcare system in its current state.... It would allow people with pre-existing conditions to have an option/more options to turn to in order to get coverage, the US government could eat up any costs the public option would cause since unlike actual businesses the US government can sustain debts and shortfalls for years if not decades (See the USPS as evidence), and by not forcing health insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions which eat into their profit margins, overall costs of these health care plans would be lowered since the higher-risk clients can turn to the government for healthcare rather than be forced to be accommodated in the private sector. 

Single Payer has its benefits and shortfalls, but its far less likely to ever see the light of day in the current political climate, and Im certain that if it somehow became law that politicians would find some way to completely fuck it up. If how the GOP has responded to the implementation of Obamacare is any indication, they would also try to undermine/underfund the shit out of a single payer system at every chance they get in order to make it fail just to claim that they were correct in the first place, whereas a public option at least looks like a more bearable alternative. 

I'd be cool with a public option as long as anti-competitive regulations were lifted on private insurance companies.

isn't that something individual states can choose to offer?  Don't states set their own criteria for medicaid?

Sure, the federal government is not stopping California from having a state plan like Masshealth.