Everyone is wondering what Olympia Snowe will do in response to Max Baucus "reform" bill and whether she’ll help in meeting the 60-vote Senate obstacle. Will she or won’t she?

Thursday she told NYT reporter John Harwood that her party has changed and moved away from her.

Snowe also released a statement (h/t TPM) on her own that included this:

I believe the Chairman’s legislation moves in the right direction away from a government-run system contained in bills that have passed other Congressional committees, but a number of issues still need to be addressed — including cost assumptions and ultimate affordability to both consumers and the government as well as ensuring appropriate competition in the health insurance exchange.

And she joined in a statement with Senators Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Claire McCaskill "commending" Baucus for his proposal but noting this:

"Despite the differences that have emerged in this health care debate, there is much that we all agree on, including insurance market reforms that bar insurance companies from discriminating against people based on their health status or denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions. We also agree on prevention and wellness investments, critical delivery reforms like paying for quality rather than quantity, increasing access to care by improving health care provider training programs, and reducing uncompensated care by extending tax credits to American families to help pay for their health care coverage.

Gosh, that only leaves out whether we should or shouldn’t have individual mandates, whether employers should provide insurance of pay into a fund if they don’t, and whether private insurers have to face competition from a public option.

They’ve rejected the House surtax on the wealthiest, but we don’t know whether they’re willing to tax the middle class via a tax on high-end insurance plans or whether they think it’s fair to force uninsured Americans to purchase insurance when Lieberman and Nelson have complained more about the deficit than about the disaster the nation’s health care system has become.

And since the insurers made the insurance reforms the Senators support conditional on the mandate that everyone buy their products with federal subsidies but no competition, we’re left with . . . what? That opfte repeated phrase, "we have agreement on 80 percent," has always been a bit shaky.

I think Snowe is/can be a sensible person, and she clearly understands her Party has gone off the deep end. We can only hope that getting her to do something sensible will bring along clueless Ben Nelson and the opportunistic Joe Lieberman. If not, you have to wonder if the Senate is capable of doing anything except celebrate motherhood and apple pie and adopt pound foolish limits on immigrants contributing to the costs of health care, and I’m not sure about motherhood.

Update:
Greg Sargeant,Plum Line, Rockefeller tells Ezra Klein that Snowe is getting hammered by Republicans not to agree to any health reform bill.