This is very important. If this comes through we will likely get a weak public option. But in said case we must prepare ourselves to get rid of the Senators over time that do not have the best interest of Americans. Upon this we will eventually modify the bill appropriately.
In a breakthough in Senate negotiations around a public health insurance option, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) sat down with centrist conservative Democrats for the first time Saturday since the bipartisan Gang of Six broke up shortly after returning from the August recess. Since then, Snowe, the most likely Republican to cross the aisle on health care reform, has been meeting individually with Democrats, but had yet to rejoin negotiations in a formal way.
Snowe, emerging from a meeting on the first floor of the Capitol, Saturday afternoon, told a few reporters hovering outside the room that she had been approached earlier that morning about attending.
She said that no agreement had yet been reached, but that the group was considering "another option," aside from those already under discussion. An agreement had been reached that it would not be publicly discussed, she said, until more details were worked out. Earlier Saturday, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) also mentioned the new option being kicked around but said he couldn’t discuss it.
Kerry said that Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) was one of the leading intellectual fathers of this new approach, an assertion Snowe confirmed, adding that Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) were also closely involved.
Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colorado), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) also attended the meeting.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) was not at the meeting and has vowed to filibuster any bill that has any version of a public option. If Lieberman holds to his threat, Democrats would need Snowe to break a GOP-Lieberman filibuster.
Snowe said she was still pushing her "trigger" proposal and met yesterday with Kerry to discuss it. Kerry, she said, has long been open to such a plan. Under her trigger, the public option would only be available in states where private insurance is deemed unaffordable to a certain percentage of residents. Advocates of the public option say a trigger is as good as no public option at all, because it will be gamed by insurance companies so that it never "triggers." [CONTINUED]
