By John Brummett

U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln and President Obama met on health care for a half-hour in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon. You wonder what in the world could have been said. There’s not a position on a health care detail between them.

The only thing Obama has made clear is that he wants to pass health reform legislation without running up the deficit over a decade. He wants magic, in other words.

As for the contentious particulars in the thousands of pages in five Democratic health care bills that have cleared committees in Congress, Obama is detached from all that. He advocates generally. He clings hard to comfortable principles.

Otherwise he wants to let the legislative process work. While an understandable strategy considering Hillary Clinton’s fatally flawed micromanagement 16 years before, that might also be called passing the buck.

Lincoln’s position is equally clear. It’s that we must pass health care reform because we can’t afford not to.

But she says the people of Arkansas understand one thing: They don’t want this deficit run up.

So Lincoln, like her president, wants health care reform for free.

She gets semi-specific only on one point of contention, a big one. She is rather seriously disinclined, which is not quite to say opposed, on this opt-out public insurance option that Majority Leader Harry Reid is pushing in the Senate.

That’s the one that would create a federal government insurer but permit states to choose not to let it operate inside their borders. Lincoln says she’s worried that such a public option would put too much financial risk on taxpayers.

So does that mean she would join Republicans in putting together 41 votes to filibuster the opt-out public insurer and keep it from going to the floor, where a simple majority that Democrats probably could achieve would pass it?

Well, no. She’s not saying that.

Lincoln told reporters that the president had really twisted her arm. I jest.

She said Obama expressed a desire to get health care reform done quickly, but agreed that all issues needed to be considered carefully.

Such banality. Taxpayers deserve a refund on the depreciation of the Oval Office furniture used for this little sit-down.

Surely this account is window-dressing. Surely more substance actually took place.

We know that Lincoln asked for this meeting. We can surmise that it wasn’t merely so she and the president could look at each other and mouth the raging nothingness that has been reported.

My best guess is that she wanted to tell the president personally that she couldn’t vote to end a filibuster against Reid’s bill as long as it contained the opt-out public option.

It’s that she wanted to tell him personally that she didn’t deserve to be in the position she was in, with a tough re-election battle only months away in a state Obama lost by 20 points. She probably didn’t have the nerve to say that Republican Olympia Snowe has been extended more courtesy and consideration by the White House than she. I’m rather sure she didn’t get right down to the nitty-gritty and say, “Barack, old buddy, you’ve got a 56 percent disapproval rating in my state. I’m losing ground in my re-election just by sitting here.”

My best guess is that she told the president she wanted the opt-out public option removed before she had to cast any kind of vote — and, if so obliged, would, in turn, look kindly on the idea of a triggered public option that would apply in areas without competing private insurers providing affordable coverage.

All of that assumes she has an ability in private to get firmly to a point that she can never seem to get in the vicinity of in public.

The interesting thing is that it’s possible that a triggered public option, if not written with absurd restriction, could cover more needy people than a general public option that states could opt out of.

That’s because many red states would opt out if given the right, from Alabama to Utah up to Wyoming and over to the Dakotas, possibly to include Mike Beebe’s Arkansas, though I doubt it. We like the federal money down here, and we need it.

But a trigger would kick in automatically if those red states contained regions that didn’t have affordable private options for their uninsured citizens.

If Lincoln told the president what I postulate here that she told him, then she might actually have done some good. But we can only guess.

——-
John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.