By NYCeve (Eve Gittelson)

There is no place for triggers when it comes to the public option and healthcare reform.

The insurance industry has had sixty years to become simply decent corporate citizens—not good or exemplary models of corporate beneficence, just law abiding. Compassion isn’t a part of their corporate playbook. At our most vulnerable moments, this parasitic industry cemented at the heart of our healthcare system, unleashes terror in the form of denials begetting financial ruin against sick and injured Americans. All in the pursuit of profit.

Equally appalling, across the nation, insurers have been sanctioned by civil and criminal authorities for repeated and egregious consumer abuses. Still the political class is hard at work trying to figure out how to give this industry more time to mend its deplorable business practices. This is the rationale for applying a trigger mechanism to the public option.

Triggers=the death of the public option.

David Sirota makes the point that a “trigger mechanism”, is a means by which politicians kick the policy can down the road—maybe forever, and end up, ultimately doing nothing.

The giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry known as Medicare D, is a case in point. It was designed to allow the importation of drugs from Canada if certain “triggers” were met. They never were.

As with today’s public option surveys, polls on importation showed strong national support for the concept. So rather than murder the drug legislation outright, congressional leaders joined the Clinton and Bush administrations in backing a “compromise”: Importation bills were passed, but only those that gave the secretary of Health and Human Services the power to trigger – or not trigger – final implementation. Specifically, the secretary would have to first certify that imported medicines were “safe” (drug companies promote the lie that Canadian medicine is mortally dangerous – prompting Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, an importation proponent, to ask, “Where are the dead Canadians?”).

Sirota’s take home message is as true today for triggering a public option, as it was when the nonsensical Medicare D triggers were hatched.

This trigger provision, of course, was lobbyists’ poison pill – and it worked as they planned. Importation has never been implemented, as no HHS secretary has pulled the trigger. Hence, Americans are still barred from wholesale importation of lower-priced medicine – and pharmaceutical industry profiteering continues.

The moral of the story is that triggers are just another version of the old Blue Ribbon Commission trick. They are designed not as good public policy, but as devious political tactics to help dishonest lawmakers look like they support popular measures – all while guaranteeing those measures never become reality.

In a September 3rd interview, Representative Lynn Woolsey makes the identical point. Trigger=death of the public option.

The White House is now floating the idea of passing health care reform with a so-called “trigger,” as proposed by Sen. Olympia Snowe. Could progressives support a plan like that? Well, I can’t. And no, we can’t, because it will actually delay what we know is the most important part of health care reform, which is offering choice and competition, and we need a robust public health care plan immediately, not when the private health insurers prove once again that they either can’t or won’t solve the health care reform needs in this country.

Rep. Woolsey:

So, in your view, it would just be postponing what needs to happen for a few more years?

Rep. Woolsey: Well, if they even pull the trigger. We have Part D Medicare as our example. There’s a trigger that was the compromise in that legislation, and it’s never been pulled, and there are all kinds of problems with Medicare Part D, and we’ve never pulled the trigger so that there could be a public plan in that.

So even if legislation with a trigger is passed, there’s no guarantee that the trigger would get pulled?

Rep. Woolsey: Right. I mean we have to just look at Medicare Part D. It should have been pulled and it never has been, and I doubt that it ever will be.

Is there any way that the trigger mechanism could be set up in a better way than it was with Medicare Part D?

Rep. Woolsey: No. It’s a phony way to—you know, I don’t think Olympia Snow is phony, but for the subject of health care reform, it is putting off what we should be doing in the first place, and putting it off, probably, in perpetuity.

How many more chances, and how many more years do we give the for-profit insurance industry? How many more Americans need to die? As Nicholas Kristof writes in his blog in the New York Times, “the most compelling argument for reform isn’t improved productivity or efficiency, but simply that the present system is morally offensive.”