Triggering A Deal On Obamacare

The big news this morning is that CNN is reporting the Obama administration is cutting a deal with moderate Senate Republicans like Maine's Olympia Snowe for a "significantly smaller" health care deal that will include a "trigger" for a public option.

The compromise plan would lack a government-run public health insurance option favored by Obama, but would leave the door open to adding that provision down the road under an idea proposed by Snowe, the sources said.

One of the sources said White House officials are "deep in conversations" with Snowe on a much smaller health care bill than Obama originally envisioned.

The modified proposal would include insurance reforms, such as preventing insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, according to the source.

The potential deal would give insurance companies a defined period to make such changes in order to help cover more people and drive down long-term costs. But if those changes failed to occur within the defined period, a so-called "trigger" would provide for creating a public option to force change on the insurance companies, the source said.

Snowe is pivotal to the debate because she may be Obama's last possibility for getting a Republican senator to support his push for a health care overhaul.

She is one of the so-called "Gang of Six" members of the Senate Finance Committee, three Democrats and three Republicans, involved in separate negotiations on the only bipartisan health care proposal in Congress so far.

However, the slow pace of those talks and recent partisan attacks by the other two Republicans in the negotiations have dimmed hopes for a breakthrough, leaving Snowe as the only Republican senator that White House aides believe they can work with on the issue.

Snowe first proposed the so-called "trigger" idea for a public option months ago, and has talked to Obama about it on several occasions, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

In other words, the trigger option trial balloon that got shot down two months ago is now the main thrust of Obama's negotiations. As I said back then:

If a public option for health insurance is reduced to a trigger option that will purposely be crafted to never happen, there will be no health care reform. There will still be 50 million uninsured Americans, and most likely there will be a lot more as health care continues to get more expensive and employers simply drop coverage altogther, putting health care out of reach of more and more Americans.

The trigger option will be designed with criteria so easy for the insurance companies to meet that the public option will never happen. It's a brilliant plan, Obama and the Dems can claim that the whole point of the public option will be to pressure the insurance companies to lower costs, but the hurdles the insurance giants will have to navigate will be so simple that the Republicans and insurance giants will be assured that they don't have to do more than token actions. These actions will not lower health care costs by any significant amount. And to make things even better, the rest of the Republicans will certainly oppose the plan 100% screaming that the trigger option is the Sword of Damocles that will destroy America. Republicans will vow to overturn the plan completely before the public option can be triggered. It will not win any serious GOP support because the GOP will never support Democratic health care reform, period. At the very best, Olympia Snowe would be vote number 60 for breaking the guaranteed filibuster, and there's ample evidence that plenty of the other 59 Democrats will bail anyway, claiming any plan is just too much money.

Wednesday's speech before Congress will therefore be Obama's terms of surrender to the "ruling GOP". They will smile, nod, and won't even wait until Thursday morning to call the President a fascist, and his health care reform plan tyranny. The Democrats will have to go for a reconciliation process bill anyway, and the Republicans will vow to overturn the bill in 2012 before it will ever take effect, gaining scare tactics mileage for years. Since the public won't see any results from the bill before then, the GOP Pretty Hate Machine will have the rest of Obama's term to make the constant case that the plan will kill everyone they love if it is allowed to go into effect...and yes, I use the words "Obama's term", singular, for a reason.

And people will wonder in 2012 why and how the Republicans got back in charge of the country. It's because even with 59 Senate votes, the Democrats are simply incapable of governing.