Which regulations on the insurance industry are you thinking of removing? I'm very, very much in favor of, for example, removing the state-level regulations that effectively prevent new insurers from entering given health-care markets, because that is very nearly purely-anticompetitive. That does, however, hurtle headlong into both issues of local control ("State's Rights") and would create a regulatory race to the bottom). Having a public option in place, to my mind, is simply the mechanism for guaranteeing that any insurer in any market will have actual competition for the customers in that market.