By John Brummett

U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln still won’t say yes or no on whether she’d go along with a Republican filibuster against any bill containing a public option government insurer.

But she did manage to express herself a tad more forcefully on the health reform issue in a phone conversation Tuesday.

She says she’s been plenty specific, thank you, working for months — years, even — in the Senate Finance Committee on an arduously negotiated and perfectly fine bill put out under the leadership of chairman Max Baucus of Montana.

She says, “I told Harry — Majority Leader Reid — that he could pass the Finance Committee bill, but . . .”

That bill provided for no public option and for private nonprofit cooperatives instead. But then Reid decided to embrace another Senate committee’s version and propose a public option that states could opt out of.

Lincoln is plainly irked over that, but she says she can’t possibly say what she’d do on Reid’s bill — on a filibuster against it or on the bill itself — until she sees an actual piece of legislation, which doesn’t yet exist.

“The people of Arkansas expect me to read a bill before I pass judgment,” she said.

Lincoln would like us to take the abortion issue, for example.

Democrats in the House of Representatives nearly melted down over the issue Friday night. To secure 220 votes, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to go along with a provision expressly forbidding insured abortions through any private insurer participating in the new proposed health care exchange through which subsidies with public funds would be offered.

Since then President Obama and others have said we need some middle ground. It’s one thing to preserve the Hyde Amendment and continue to enforce a prohibition against using public funds for abortions. But this House amendment says a woman couldn’t even buy with her own money a policy covering abortions if her insurer was participating in this health exchange.

Lincoln says that all anyone needs to do is look at the work of the Finance Committee, which banned public money for abortions but didn’t make it impossible for a woman to get insurance for an abortion otherwise. The bill separated public subsidies from private money.

For Lincoln, that’s what all this boils down to: The Finance Committee has already dealt with all these complications and provided the heavy lifting. It has arrived at a bill that the Congressional Budget Office says would actually save a little money over 10 years, unlike any of the half-dozen others, and that one Republican, Maine’s Olympia Snowe, actually embraced.

So why is everybody trying to fix what wasn’t broken? And why does she get ridiculed for evasiveness when, darnit, she wasn’t evasive at all in the hard work that produced the Finance Committee bill? Why doesn’t someone peruse those hundreds of pages and behold just how specific she can be?

Those are Blanche’s questions and if I think that’s “wordy” or evasive, then that’s just how it will have to be.

This conversation took place a couple of hours after former President Clinton addressed the Democratic Senate caucus. He said something had to be done on health care now and that mistakes wouldn’t be the end of the world because there always will be unintended consequences and they can always be fixed.

Lincoln said she took Clinton’s comments to mean he agreed with her that Democrats ought to settle on the areas where they have agreement and pass those and move on.

“At some point we’re going to need the least common denominator instead of the most, if you want to get to 60 votes,” Lincoln said.

Critics could easily ridicule all that. You could have conservatives lampooning Clinton for saying we ought to do something even if it’s wrong. You could have liberals assailing Lincoln for saying we should do the least rather than the most.

But I know what they both meant, and, actually, I think, between them, they’re probably on to something.

This has the feel to liberal Democrats of the last best chance to do health reform. It is, in fact, the best chance. But it’s not the last. No matter what we do, health reform is probably a moving target.

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