Last Friday, an alert reader linked Steve Benen to this The Bangor Daily News writeup of Olympia Snowe's health care listening session. This quote, in particular, caught his eye:"We have a totally dysfunctional system now," she said. While like most Republicans she would prefer to see the private sector collaborate on an effective change, a government-run health care system may be the only way to get the job done, she said.Snowe's position is a bit of an odd one: She holds that we may require a single-payer system down the road but probably shouldn't have a public insurance option in the short-term. The next step, she says, is to fix the market. And Snowe argues that it's not clear that you can do that with a public insurance option. She's raised the possibility that the public plan is actually too easy on private insurers. It's a government plan, she says, and every lobby and advocacy group will exert pressure for it to cover every ill, ailment, and treatment. As such, the plan will quickly prove a better deal for the sick than the well, and it will end up being the equivalent of a "bad bank" for health risks. The private insurance market will simply skim off the healthy. In other words, the public plan wouldn't compete with the private market so much as subtly subsidize it.What I'm told Snowe is more open to, however, is a so-called "trigger" public plan. This is the equivalent of turning to the private market and saying, "prove it." Under this approach, the legislation would set certain goals for the health care system. Cost growth, say, has to slow to six percent per year. A certain number of different private plans have to compete in every market. Gym memberships have to shoot up by 20 percent. Pick your metric. If the private market fails to achieve it, then the public plan is triggered into existence -- sort of like those old video games where the time would run out and the music would kick up and an angry boss character would crash onto the screen. That said, Benen is right: Snowe is open to compromise. And so is her colleague Susan Collins. In late October, a voter asked her about health care reform. She replied that she was willing to support then-candidate Obama's proposal. “I actually think his plan is pretty good,” she said. Assuming Franken is seated and there's full Democratic unity -- big ifs, of course -- Snowe and Collins could be the 60th and 61st votes. Update: Reader AF sends along some further Bangor Daily News coverage of Olympia Snowe. The article doesn't flesh out her thinking on health care policy, but it does suggest that she's presenting herself to voters as a bipartisan problem solver willing to break with her party and solve the country's problems.
Snowe recalled how she broke ranks with former President George W. Bush by opposing Social Security privatization and a massive tax cut in 2003, drawing scorn from fellow Republicans..."It’s simple mathematics. If you want to be a broad-based party and be inclusive, you’re going to have to think about how you can appeal to all regions of the country," she said. "We don’t want to be the party that has the smallest political tent."
