Where the heck did this "trigger" business come from?
Oh, I know, we blame Olympia Snowe. There's a good idea, blame a Republican.
Well, tonite David Sirota layed it out clear as could be....
After listening to his explanation of the trigger I think he should publish one of those yellow and black jacket books entitled, "Kill The Bill Trigger" For Dummies.
Interview with Sirota begins at the 4 minute mark...
http://www.openleft.com/...
- as I show in my new newspaper column out today - triggers are the template that the health care industry has long been using to destroy any kind of reform. And if there's any subset of Democratic congressional lawmakers who should know that, it is the progressives.
Recall the effort throughout the late 1990s and 2000s whereby a group of congressional progressives and maverick Republicans waged a battle against the pharmaceutical industry and for a bill to allow the reimportation of prescription drugs from other industrialized nations. It was (and is) a commonsense proposal - other industrialized nations allow reimportation, and that reimportation helps lower prices by allowing consumers to buy FDA-approved medicines at the lowest world market price.
As with polls public option, polls on reimportation showed Americans strongly backed the concept. So rather than kill the bill outright, the congressional Republican leadership and the industry hacks in both the Clinton and Bush administrations came up with a "compromise." The bill could be passed and the celebratory press releases could be written, but only if the underlying legislation quietly gave the Secretary of Health and Human Services the final trigger power to ultimately implement the reform. Specifically, the Secretary would have to certify that imported medicines were 100 percent "safe" (at the time, the drug industry was pushing the lie that imported medicines from places like Canada were totally unsafe - prompting one honest Republican governor to ask, "where are the dead Canadians" from all the supposedly unsafe medicines).
This trigger provision, of course, made sure reimportation was never implemented at all, as no HHS secretary has agreed to sign any certification. As this New York Times story showed, the trigger was a well-calculated poison pill written by the drug industry. Hence, Americans are still legally barred from wholesale
It's no stretch to think that this is exactly what will happen if overall health care reform is destroyed by triggers - only on a much bigger scale. If Congress passes a health care bill and trumpets a public option that is undermined by triggers, consumers are very quickly going to find out what really happened. When there is no public option because those triggers were (as they will inevitably be) written to make a public option impossible (just like they were written to make reimportation impossible), consumers will realize they've been treated like gullible fools, and not just on one part of health care reform (prescription drugs), but on all of it.
At that point, my bet is you'll see a kind of anger that makes today's Glenn Beck-inspired tea parties seem mild.
(Bold is mine)