CNN’s Ed Henry and Dana Bash are reporting that the White House is negotiating with Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) — a member of the so-called Gang-of-six tasked with producing a bipartisan health care bill in the Senate Finance Committee — to pass a “scaled-back bill that would focus on insurance reforms that both sides could agree to, but would not have a full public option, instead, would have a so-called trigger.” The negotiations come in advance of the Presidsent’s September 9th address to a joint session of Congress, in which Obama is expected to lay out a specific vision for health care reform:

What we’re hearing that she’s talking about with White House staff is sort of a scaled-back bill that would focus on insurance reforms that both sides could agree to, but would not have a full public option, instead, would have a so-called trigger. What that means in layman’s terms is basically that the insurance companies would have a couple of years to make some dramatic changes. If they do not make those changes, then a public option would be triggered.

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Indeed, a trigger proposal would establish certain benchmarks: if private insurers fail to lower premiums by X% over Y years, then a public plan would enter the Exchange. To convince private insurers of the threat of public competition and maximize the effectiveness of the mechanism, policy makers would begin designing a robust Medicare-like program almost immediately after passing health reform legislation.

The White House’s embrace of Snowe’s proposal signals that it has lost confidence in Sen. Kent Conrad’s (D-ND) co-op compromise, a development that could appease Congressional liberals weary of the co-ops’ ability to lower health care spending. Conservative Democrats may also support a compromise that gives private insurers one final opportunity to lower health care costs without government interference.

The White House hopes “that this would appease liberals by saying it’s not completely off the table. And the big hope is that this could bring along another moderate Republican, like maybe Susan Collins of Maine, some conservative Democrats, like Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu in the Senate, who don’t want a public option, but would sort of potentially be open to a trigger like this,” Ed Henry said.

This morning, The New Republic’s Suzy Khimm reported that Snowe — a long-time supporter of fairly robust health insurance reforms — may also be willing to push-up the subsidy levels from 300 to 400% of the Federal Poverty Line, include large businesses in the Exchange (under the House bill, large businesses would not be able to enroll their employees in the Exchange until 2017), and do more to prohibit insurers from discriminating against older beneficiaries.

In response to critics who argue that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is not negotiating the health care bill in good faith, a Grassley spokesperson issued this statement:

Jill Kozeny, a spokeswoman for Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, said the accusations were unjustified. She said Grassley and five other Senate Finance Committee members – half Republicans, half Democrats – will hold their scheduled conference call Friday…Kozeny said Wednesday: “Attacks by political operatives in the White House undermine bipartisan efforts and drive senators away from the table….” She also called Democratic-crafted bills “policy failures and they’ve been rejected at the grassroots.”

Greassley’s summer tour to discredit the Democrats’ health care bill certainly speaks louder than his spokesperson’s commitment to bipartisanship, which Grassley promises to pursue during Friday’s phone call. But will he be looking for genuine compromise or obstruction? In other words, is there a difference between Grassley the politician and Grassley the policy maker?

All signs point to no. During a recent interview with Kaiser Health News, for instance, Grassley indicated that he has not had “any conversations” with Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) about his recent suggestions that the public option would pull the plug on grandma, refusal to to vote for an “imperfect bill” or statement that “the only way to get a bipartisan agreement is to defeat a Democratic proposal on the first hand.” Grassley said there was “nothing” “that needed to be clarified or straightened out” in his relationship with Baucus.

In fact, the above statement re-affirms Grassley’s commitment to obstructionism. Democratic-crafted bills are “policy failures and they’ve been rejected at the grassroots,” Grassley’s spokesperson says, on the eve of Grassley’s “bipartisan negotiations” about said policies. A more honest broker would have admitted that voters haven’t rejected Democratic-crafted bill; they’ve rejected Republican rumors about the Democratic bills.