When Harry Reid announced today that his Senate health reform bill would include a national public option with a state opt out, the most puzzling reaction came from Maine’s Senator Olympia Snowe.

Yeah, puzzling. From the NYT coverage:

“I am deeply disappointed with the majority leader’s decision to include a public option as the focus of the legislation,” Ms. Snowe said. “I still believe that a fallback, safety-net plan, to be triggered and available immediately in states where insurance companies fail to offer plans that meet the standards of affordability, could have been the road toward achieving a broader bipartisan consensus in the Senate.”

Now, I personally think allowing those states that have a history of being a lot less generous on Medicaid and SCHIP to opt out on something this important to the public welfare may be politically clever, but it’s an appalling policy. If this is the best the Senate can do, it tells us a lot about how dysfunctional the Senate is.

But why on earth is the Senator from Maine “deeply disappointed?” She just got everything she requested, and Harry Reid even figured out how to answer the question her own proposal raised.

If Olympia Snowe doesn’t want the citizens of Maine to have the choice of a public option, then Harry Reid’s solution allows her the opportunity to convince the voters and officials of her state to opt out of the national public plan that will likely be an available choice to citizens in other New England states. And as far as we know, Maine could then set it’s own trigger, either for making that decision in the first instance, or presumably to unmake it should some circumstances occur that convinces Maine it made a mistake.

The lady wanted triggers and state control. She got them.

But she also wanted something else, though she never described how it would work. In the event the triggering conditions occurred, Ms. Snowe wanted “a fallback, safety-net plan, to be triggered and available immediately.” How was that supposed to work?

How could we both (1) not have an operable, ready-to-go public plan just sitting on the shelf, and then (2) suddenly have it “available immediately” as soon as Maine realized it had made a mistake and that it’s citizens were being gouged by the insurance industry? It could take a year or more to get a completely new system up and running, and without sufficient national leverage, it’s not clear it could even get started, since Maine is locked up, dominated by one or two insurers and their networks of providers. The very conditions that caused the trigger would be precisely the conditions that could delay or frustrate getting Snowe’s backup safety net up and running.

Olympia Snowe never solved that problem, but Harry Reid could, at least if he’s smart.

Harry’s solution is to have a national plan already up and running everywhere. It would be open for business, with providers and functioning billing/payment systems, so that as soon as people signed up, they could get immediate coverage. Ideally, if Harry and his colleagues thought this through, the plan would be closely tied to, based on, Medicare, so that the moment you started, most of the business arrangements would be familiar and ready to go. The basis for provider relationships would already be established.

Then if Maine (1) opted out, but later (2) realized it screwed up and (3) pleaded to be let back in because its citizens and small businesses were being gouged by private insurers . . . a fully operational backup plan would be there, ready to go — “available immediately.”

So why is Olympia Snowe “deeply disappointed?” Does her staff not understand what her own words mean? Is there no one in Rahm’s office the White House who can get her to say “yes” to what she requested?

Of course, it’s possible that Senator Snowe meant something else. For example, perhaps she meant not only that she didn’t want Mainers to have the choice of a public option, but she also wanted to deny that choice to the citizens in every other state, even though large majorities in most states (never mind Maine) want this choice. But if that’s what she meant, how should Senators from those other states respond?

Methinks the Lady doth protest too much.

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btw — Harry Reid’s proposal reportedly contains a version of the “free-rider” penalty in lieu of a more general business mandate. Most (all?) health reform wonks think that’s a terrible idea. It weakens the mandate that allows for broad risk pooling,, and it’s full of perverse incentives for employers to discriminate against low income workers. But wasn’t that another of Senator Snowe’s ideas? If she sponsors an amendment to fix that mess, I suggest all 60 members of the Democratic caucus join with her. Give the lady what she wants.