Earlier this month, the White House was building support for a scaled-back health care bill that would trigger a public health insurance option if private health insurers did not substantially reduce health care costs. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) — a member of the Senate Finance Committee and the so-called Gang-of-six tasked with producing a bipartisan health care bill — had floated the idea and was negotiating the option with the White House.

But this morning on CBS’s Face The Nation, Snowe suggested that a ‘trigger’ did not generate any bipartisan support. “It’s not on the table and it won’t be,” in the final Senate Finance Committee bill, Snowe said. “We’ll be using the co-op as an option at this point as a means for injecting competition in the process.”

Watch it:

A trigger proposal would activate a public option into the Exchange if private insurers failed to lower premiums by X% over Y years and — if triggered — may lead to greater cost reductions than Sen. Kent Conrad’s (D-ND) proposal to establish a network of consumer driven health care cooperatives.

As Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) explained this morning on ABC’s This Week, “people talk about a cooperative plan. Health co-ops. And I called the head of the national association really early, and he said, it’s great on water, it’s great on farm, it’s great on electricity, etc, but it really doesn’t work on health care. There are fewer than 20 in the country and there are only two that really work. And one of them is in Washington, the other one is in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And both of these senators from Washington are voting for a public option. So it hasn’t had a future, it goes back to the 30s and 40s, and I don’t think you can take the chance. You have to start a national thing all the way up.”

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) is expected to release the official draft of the committee’s bill on Wednesday. Most observers believe that it may be the only legislation that could pass the senate through regular procedure. On Fox News Sunday, however, Sen Orrin Hatch (R-UT) — also a member of the committee — said, “Even with all the work that I give my fellow senators credit for in the Finance Committee…I just do not believe that they’re going to have the Republican support on this type of approach.” Snowe refused to say if she would cast the lone Republican vote for the committee’s health legislation.

This morning, on ABC’s This Week, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) suggested that unless the government has “the enforcement mechanism in place,” undocumented immigrants will receive health care coverage under health care reform. Host George Stephanopoulos challenged Pawlenty by pointing to a House oversight committee report which reviewed six state Medicaid programs in 2007 and found that “they spent about $8 million to enforce it and caught 8 illegal immigrants”:

PAWLENTY: Even if you have language that says illegal immigrants will not be part of this program, unless you have the enforcement mechanism in place, it doesn’t mean much. In Minnesota, we have laws that say illegal immigrants won’t get many services but unless somebody actually checks, guess what, they show up and get the services.

STEPHANOPOULOS: This enforcement though, there has been a study done by the House oversight committee that showed in these Medicaid provisions, they spent about $8 million to enforce it and caught 8 illegal immigrants.

Pawlenty, caught off-guard, simply replied, “Well, clearly, though, if you have a law that’s unenforced, it isn’t much of a law.” Watch it:

As Andrea Nill points out, “when Colorado passed a series of stringent measures requiring applicants for most state benefits to prove their immigration status, it cost the state $2 million in its first year alone and state officials could not prove that any undocumented immigrants” applied for the program in the first place. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act already prohibits undocumented immigrants from being eligible for most public benefits, restricts the eligibility of legal immigrants, and codifies procedures for verifying eligibility in a way that guaranteed that almost no immigrant would slip through cracks in theory and in practice.

In fact, documentation requirements may be weeding out more eligible applicants than illegals. According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, verification requirements have led thousands of Americans eligible for Medicaid to lose coverage and added new administrative costs that “far exceeded the savings.”