Nancy Pelosi on the Trigger

Jay Newton-Small has a good look at the state-of-play within the House of Representatives. This seems the key bit of news:

"I believe that a public option will be essential to our passing a bill in the House of Representatives," Pelosi told reporters on the White House driveway Tuesday afternoon, after a meeting with the president. However, when pressed about whether she might accept a compromise that would allow for a public plan only if lack of competition in the marketplace triggers it a few years down the line, Pelosi for the first time equivocated, as her Democratic-leadership colleagues had already done. "This, as you know, is the legislative process. And right now, we will have a public option in our bill."

In some ways, I'm more skeptical of the trigger than I am of a co-op option (at least a co-op option organized along the lines that Chuck Schumer has suggested). I've not yet seen a proposal for a trigger where the trigger is set sufficiently low and the public option it would create would be national, rather than state-by-state. Suzy Khimm's reporting on Snowe's conditions did not comfort me.

At the very least, the trigger and the co-ops could coexist, just as the public option and the co-ops could — and should — coexist. The more choices people have, and the more models that get a shot at proving themselves, the better off we are.