C-SPAN covered a "town hall" held by RNC Chair Michael Steele with students at Howard University.

In the last portion, Steele tried to answer a question about why Republicans believe Americans should not have the choice of a public health insurance option it they’re required to purchase health insurance. He never came close.

Steele initially offered that he didn’t think the Democrats had sufficiently defined the features of a public option, ignoring Democratic proposals to make it "like Medicare," but he then attempted to explain why a concept he claimed no one had defined was a bad idea.

He next asserted that providing the choice of a public option would be a burden for small businesses. Steele either didn’t know, or declined to explain that the Democratic bills already exempted most small business from the mandates to offer or pay for insurance. And he probably didn’t want to mention that small business representatives in Maine had told Olympia Snowe that they opposed a mandate on their businesses unless there was a public option to help control the costs.

Steele’s proof for this small business burden was a conversation he had with an executive of a major US corporation. Without acknowledging this switch from "small" to "major" businesses, Steele said the large business exec told him that if he was faced with a choice of providing insurance or paying the proposed 8 percent payroll tax under a "play or pay" provision, a rational business owner would choose to pay the tax, because it was cheaper.

Where is he going with this non-sequitur, I wondered?

Steele then pursued the point by rhetorically asking the students why the large business should continue to provide insurance when its employees could get subsidized insurance.

At this point, most of the student audience should have been laughing at this nonsense, but following an earlier disruption (h/t HuffPo’s Dave Zirin), they’d just been admonished not to yell out or interrupt Mr. Steele. So no one was allowed to explain that what Steele was saying had nothing to do with a small business, nor was it relevant to whether a reform bill should or shouldn’t include a public option.

The large business exec’s "play or pay" choice isn’t the result of having a public option but of having a mandate; it would be driven by the cost of employer-based group insurance available to the business versus the size of the penalty the business would pay if it didn’t offer insurance. Moreover, that exec probably knew that at the rate employer-based insurance premiums were rising, more and more businesses will be dropping insurance coverage for their employees whether or not we have mandates or a public option.

Continuing his walk through incoherence, Steele then added that another concern was that no one knew how "it" (the public plan?) would be paid for. Since Steele was by now totally disconnected from anything having to do with the public option or the question he was supposedly answering, he might have been referring to the cost of subsidies to help low and moderate income folks get access to Medicaid or health insurance — but we’ll never know.

Everything Steele said, in short, was completely irrelevant to the public option question and/or gibberish, leaving us the choice of concluding he’s an idiot or trying to make sense of what he said. But if you take Steele at his word, we could conclude that Republicans oppose the public option, a business mandate to provide insurance, any requirement that businesses contribute to a fund to help cover the uninsured, and any other means of raising those revenues and thus any mechanism for dealing with 45 million uninsured. And since he’d already criticized cutting Medicare funding, what’s left?

Meanwhile, Roll Call (via Think Progress) caught Chuck Grassley being equally incoherent:

“There’s a feeling that the only way to get a bipartisan agreement is to defeat a Democratic proposal in the first hand and then the Democrats will come to Republican leadership. And then at that point, they’ll know the only way they’re going to get health care reform is bipartisan. But my position has been that if that strategy doesn’t work and the Democrats go ahead and establish a public option, for instance, or a play or pay as a way of putting an 8 percent tax on payrolls for people who don’t offer health insurance — and dozens of other bad things — including leading us to Canadian-style single payer plan, then, if the Democrats are successful in doing that, we’ll be stuck with that plan forever,” Grassley told reporters. “So I’ve been taking to Max Baucus and other Democrats trying to ward off such a role of the dice, and ward off any chance that we’d end up with a government-run, federalized health insurance program like Canada has.”

So, according to Chuck Grassley, the rational strategy for his party is to say "no" to all the major proposals for reform, because those would lead to universal coverage that we’d keep forever because people here are just as rational as those in Canada and know a good deal when they see it. Shunning the Democrats in this manner, Chuck concludes, will force them to come to their knees and accede to Republican demands.

That’s funny, because I think the Democrats have finally come to exactly the same conclusion about how to "negotiate" with the Republicans. Thanks for the tip, Chuck, and by the way, your time is up.

The next thing I want to know is why an intelligent woman like Olympia Snowe is still allowing idiots like Michael Steele and Chuck Grassley speak for her? And when will she answer the question Steele couldn’t grasp or answer and stand up for Maine’s small businesses?

Video: PBS News Hour interview with Jacob Hacker, September 1, 2009.