Okay, my apologies to Roy Rogers, but I was pleased to see in the New York Times that the idea of a public plan trigger is finally getting serious consideration by the White House and by Senate Finance Committee members.
I proposed the trigger concept in a piece that ran in THCB back in March. It was clear then that a nationwide public plan faced very considerable political obstacles, and I suggested that a more acceptable approach might be to establish a public plan option that would be implemented only where and when private plans failed to meet predetermined cost control targets.
Senator Olympia Snowe proposed the trigger approach to fellow members of Senate Finance some weeks ago, and the NYT reports that the White House—desperate for at least one Republican vote in the Senate—is now analyzing its political feasibility and practicality.
Senator Snowe’s approach, reflecting the situation in her home state of Maine, where the market is dominated by a single insurer, would tie the trigger to affordability, rather than to cost control. This approach has political advantages, but could be labeled as unfair, since it includes a factor that private plans cannot control—individual incomes—in the trigger comparison. It also has the disadvantage of focusing on individuals who are just above the Medicaid income threshold. To achieve affordability for this lower-income group could mean a public plan network virtually identical to that of Medicaid, raising the question: why not just allow this group to buy-in to Medicaid?
