by Patrick Appel
Maddow's take on the politics of sacrificing the public plan, should it happen:
[If] the president decides that he's going to go with a reform effort that doesn't include a public option, what he will have done is spent a ton of political capital, riled up an incredibly angry right wing base who's been told that this is a plot to kill grandma...and he will have achieved something that doesn't change health care very much and that doesn't save us very much money and won't do very much for the American people. It's not a very good thing to spend a lot of political capital on.
Marc asks Maddow some questions and then tries to understand what giving up the public plan would mean (more in that vein over at 538). Marc then quotes an administration official saying that Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius "misspoke."