The public option compromise in the Senate includes a national federal fallback plan that is triggered if private non-profit plans don’t fill the role. This has always seemed like a sensible political compromise to me. I wrote on May 4:
What I would find more plausible is an argument that calls for a public fallback option. That is, if the private market does not provide solutions to the problems we wish to solve in some market then a public plan that does so by government fiat would enter…
I’m not the only one who expected a trigger (see Kevin Drum).
