Snowe, Carper In Discussions About Trigger-Like Amendment

This afternoon, I asked Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) whether she'd been looped in on an idea, floated recently by Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), to tweak her proposal to affix a public option to a trigger mechanism. Indeed she and Carper have discussed his plan, but she remains pessimistic that it'll ever be adopted.

"Tom and I have been working on it, we've had discussions and so on, but, you know, we haven't got down in concrete terms, and he'd like to have my affordability language and so on," Snowe said. "But nevertheless it's still going to require 60 votes so I don't know when that would happen, and frankly I would have preferred that to happen at the outset of this process, rather than going through this convoluted procedural gymnastics."

Carper's proposal would mimic Snowe's trigger plan in many ways, though the two differ in one key respect. Snowe's idea is to give insurance companies about a year, competing with each other in health insurance exchanges, to lower premium prices and expand access on their own. The federal public option would only then appear on the exchanges in states that don't meet her so-called affordability standard.

Carper's plan would use a similar--or perhaps identical--standard, but crucially, that standard would have to be met at the time the exchanges launch. No year delay. That seems to be why he calls his plan "the hammer" as opposed to "the trigger"

In any case, this idea is worth keeping an eye on. Snowe objected today to the idea of an opt-out on the more substantive grounds that states shouldn't be allowed to opt-out if they don't offer any affordable options. That's an argument one can imagine appealing to public option supporters, provided the affordability standard was rigid and rigorous.