Via my friend Ben Fritz, a Los Angeles Times reporter tries and fails to convince a protestor that health care reform has no public option:

Outside the fieldhouse, Mike Moehlenhof, a 24-year-old college student majoring in accounting, carried a “tea party” sign. Asked about the new law, he said he was displeased that it contains a “public option.” Told that it does not, he said he wasn’t convinced.

“It’s a major expenditure that for me as a young man, I’ll have to pay for for the rest of my life,” Moehlenhof said.

Someone else I know just overheard a similar conversation in which two conservatives complained that everyone was going to be forced onto the public option by health care reform. Pollsters: Can someone do a poll on how much of the public thinks the public option was in the final bill?

(For more on how and why this happens, see my op-ed or my article on the difficulty of correcting misperceptions.)