The news has been filled with multiple reports of the White House working with Republican Senator Olympia Snowe -- one of the only remaining GOP moderates in a Senate that has been systematically purged of them via primaries -- on a healthcare "trigger", in which a so-called public option would only take effect if, after two years, other, weaker reforms fail to provide Americans with affordable healthcare.
It was back in the Spring that Snowe first floated her idea to create a public health insurance option, but only trigger its creation if the private market does not meet benchmarks to extend coverage to all Americans. After a meeting at the White House in July, Snowe elaborated a bit on her vision for the trigger plan: "This option would be available from day one in any state where – after market and insurance reforms are implemented – affordable, competitive plans still do not exist."
It seems fairly astounding that the White House would really want to bargain on such a thing. "Trigger" legislation is fairly infamous as a method of conducting a gigantic, transparent legislative whiff to keep the status quo while still being able to send letters back home saying that you've done a nebulous "something" that will really, for sure this time, do something supposedly substantive in the future. Triggers are designed to never actually be triggered, after all: if a "trigger" for a public option was strong enough to actually threaten the insurance industry, it would hit the exact same roadblocks that the public option itself has hit: a phalanx of top-industry-connected house and senate members who simply aren't interested in letting it happen, and will water it down until it no longer poses a threat.
More to the point, if our metrics are "affordable and competitive", that means next to nothing, and all parties involved know it. All the insurance industry has to do in order to dodge the affordable trigger entirely is to offer up more of the current "junk" plans that are relatively inexpensive, but don't cover anything when you actually need them: plans with $20k, $50k deductables and the like. That's exactly what they're doing now, since they've priced more effective insurance entirely out of the hands of millions of people. As long as it's "affordable" -- and a plan that covers nothing can be pretty affordable, compared to plans that actually provide healthcare coverage when you need it -- and "competitive" -- within the industry itself, with no outside public pressures on containing costs -- they're home free. Making the plan state-by-state? Again, a way to carve out what counts as "competitive" on a per-state basis, and a way to avoid regulation across the country even as individual states continued to be sucked dry.
Nothing in such a plan would solve the problem of actually getting health care -- if you have junk insurance, you won't go to the doctor anyway, unless it's an emergency. And it won't solve the problem of people going bankrupt when they get sick. It'll just let the Senate bail on the whole damn thing, which is exactly what the insurance companies want, and exactly what much of the Senate has been desperately fighting to do. There's absolutely no way they'll design a "trigger" that is strong enough to kick in, or they'd be doing it now.
And I'll point out that the only way to make coverage "affordable" and "competitive", according to the insurance companies, is to mandate that everyone buys their products. It would seem impossible to have a "trigger" without first mandating that all Americans must purchase private insurance plans, which is the exact thing that will make even many diehard activists, like myself, vow to burn the current Democratic Party to the ground.
In short, it's the latest terrible, waffling, industry-sponsored idea in a season that has seen no shortage of terrible, industry-sponsored ideas, all in attempts to avoid doing anything truly substantive or useful in reforming our severely broken healthcare system. We've come to expect it from the dysfunctional senate, from the GOP and the various industry-fellating Blue Dogs. But to have the White House itself entertain it, in a week which has seen numerous anonymous leaks from the White House apparently meant to signal how very, very ready individual members of the administration are to cave on whatever needs to be caved on, seems yet another bungle in a summer of badly bungled strategy.