TPM Reader FC pleads, “Stop the madness!”:

You’re part of the problem. I don’t expect much from Politico or AP because they’re shills for the Republican Party. But I hold TPM to a higher standard. You’re getting your readers worked up about some anonymous sources and Axelrod’s language (I can’t believe you’re deconstructing the word “spirit”) in order to start the whole hyperventilating-of-progressives cycle again.

It’s like the movie Ground Hog Day: someone writes an article with tons of anonymous sources about how the Administration is abandoning the public option. The progressive blogosphere goes crazy for the next 48 hours. The Administration comes out with a statement saying nothing has changed, and they would prefer a public option. The progressive blogosphere calms down and finds some other shiny object to fixate on. Then someone writes another article with tons of anonymous sources about how the Administration is abandoning the public option, and we start the whole process over again. It’s exhausting, and you’re not helping!

Not just FC. TPM Reader JF, too:

I have to say I am disappointed with your political radar on the public option issue today.

Every time someone says the President doesn’t care about the public option he stands up in front of an audience and explains that he is for it and more cogently than anyone else out there explains how it would work and why he thinks it is a good idea. It’s also true that he usually points out that the public option is merely a part of a larger reform, the other parts of which are extremely important and critical to expanding coverage and controlling costs. As a matter pf policy he is of course correct.

[As an aside I am disappointed that intelligent people like you seem to ignore the fact that there are many things that work to control costs that do not depend on the public option at all. They don’t even depend on who is paying–but how we pay and for what. The 50% of health care that is already paid for by the government has a serious cost control problem, too.]

Politically, the problem for Obama is how to make the public option politically palatable to members of his own party, and also to the public who are suspicious of change (and no the public answering the polls have no idea what the “public option” really means). Drawing a line in the sand and insisting on the most rigid form of the public option is about the stupidest way to do it. Turning health care reform into a referendum on the “public option” is as stupid politically as turning Social Security reform into a referendum on privatization. The only people who want that are the far right and the far left.

What he is going to do is give the hold-outs in his party versions of the public option that they can sell to their constituents. He’ll say the exchange will include a non-profit self-funded plan run by a government chartered corporation that will be administered by private contractors (like Medicare, by the way). Or he say we’ll have a public plan and co-ops and consumers can choose. He may propose a public option that only goes into place if for example health care premiums in a specific market rise by more than consumer inflation more than two years in a row or by more than X% in any one year. (If you study the experience of the State of Wisconsin with value based purchasing you will find out that the threat of starting a public plan in counties that had little or no competition among insurers was usually enough to get the insurers back in line). Anyway there are many versions. To suggest that this in any way compromises the objective of a guaranteed life-time access for everyone o high quality care that is affordable individually and collectively is nonsense.