Just idly musing here, and picking up on Greenwald's idea that the whole "public option" (or "plan" -- they still haven't decided!) is a distraction from the real game:

My thought is that, being outsiders, we need some sort of testable model -- OK, a "narrative" -- for where the administration is going here. Nothing fancy, but I'm not really having an "Aha" moment with the idea that the administration was going to sell out "public option" in a "compromise." I mean, to unterbussen, that was always a given, right? Standard operating procedure (FISA; TARP).

So what else is going on? I don't imagine for a moment that Rahm's going to let this crisis go to waste, so -- not to be foily here -- assuming that "public option" is misdirection, what's the direction? * Here, Hipparchia reminds us that of HR3200's 1000 pages, 800 are devoted to Medicare. Makes sense, then, if the 200 devoted to "public option" were going to be thrown away, that the meat of the bill is really there.

It feels to me like we've got a "best and brightest" situation here where a cohort of academic tinkerers are just itching to set themselves loose on the health care that America's elders receive, and "fix" it, based on a mandate to cut costs** and with no real accountability. (This is, in fact, mainstream Progressivism historically, as opposed to that nasty Populism: Insulate policy making from politics and put it into the hands of neutral technocrats. Of course, since a technocrat's expertise is so often frozen politics, unexamined as politics -- see under "efficient markets hypothesis" -- the Progressive technocrats don't really insulate from politics, but democracy, and the very last thing they are is neutral.) What could go wrong?

Ideological components:

1. "Nudge" methodology ("applied corporatism");

2. Dartmouth study***

3. Evidence-based medicine

4. Electronic Medical Records

5. Dissing the elders in a youth-centric culture; dissing elder women in a sexist society. (It's not an accident that "granny" is a contested meme here.)

6. Others?

Governmental components:

1. The proposed IMAC (Independent Medicare Advisory Council Act) gives me the creeps. It's a non-transparent and unaccountable board with powers that are not clear, but whose mandate is to cut costs [Translation: Keep the insurance companies alive and protect Congress from elders chasing them with canes.] ****

2. Medicare/Medicaid administrator (who Obama has not re-appointed)

3. IRS (to enforce mandate compliance)

4. OMB? (Who's measuring and defining success, here?)

5. Others?

Anyway, random thoughts. As I said, puzzle pieces. But working on the assumption that the "public option" narrative isn't in the class of real stories, we'd better begin to figure out the real stories tout suite. The lives at stake may be our own...

* * *

NOTE * Some thoughts on method:

1. Respect fear. I think that when "progressives" demonize ordinary Disruptors -- not the ones with the clipboards or the paid staffers -- and especially when they focus on their age, that's a dead obvious tell. It means they're preparing to throw that (doubtless "racist" and "uneducated") segment of the population under the bus. We don't need to respect the way that the fear is expressed, but we do need to respect the fear. It's entirely rational, for example, to fear cuts in Medicare. That's what "entitlement reform" means! And it's also entirely rational to fear that the costs of "reform" will come out of their hides. That's exactly what is happening when the Dems propose to tax employer-based health insurance! (Contrast the carefully worked out funding mechanisms of HR676, which spread the costs widely, and include Wall Street!). Even if they're paranoid, that doesn't mean they don't have real enemies, who are the same as our enemies.

2. Look for lack of transparency. Glenn calls this the "original sin" of the administration, and he's right. We "little single payer advocates" know that the claims by the administration for an open and transparent process were nothing more the direct opposite of the truth, because we've been excluded and censored from the beginning, and until Anthony Weiner broke through, it's been that way for the entire process. And both FISA and TARP were all about reinforcing unaccountable power through lack of transparency. At this point, we can assume that this is the administration's modus operandi. So look for it in the legislation, because it's the steering wheel and the gearshift are.

3. Look for the payoff. Given the "secret deal" with Big Pharma, we're all Chicagoans now, after all. The mandate is a bailout for the insurance companies; ERM is a bailout for the tech industries, and in particular for Google's Eric Schmidt; etc. "We don't want nobody nobody sent."

NOTE ** And all so that the insurance companies can stay in business! The real way to cut costs, of course, is to cut out the 30% of every dollar that the insurance companies loot.

NOTE *** A study with no controls for the sickness of the sample population that then seeks to study variations in the treatment of those populations. GIGO, anyone?

NOTE **** The wingers want to take money from Medicare and give it to the insurance companies right out front in the legislation. At least they're honest about it. The Democrats don't operate that way. But if IMAC is modelled on the base closing commissions, with the idea that an unaccountable and non-transparent magic board would make the "tough choices" on "entitlement reform", then the Dems would simply be servicing the insurance companies in a more subtle way, but to the same end.

MISCELLANEOUS RESOURCES FWIW, given it's Kaiser, but here's a PDF summarizing the Medicare provisions of HR3200. Obama transcripts in NH and MT. Maybe I should run a diff on them, given that they're only two days apart...