Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said he will include a public option that states can vote to opt out of in his version of the health care reform bill that could be unveiled as early as Wednesday. But that certainly hasn’t ended the debate in the Senate about what kind of public option may finally end up passing the upper chamber and if you talk to centrists the only word you hear is trigger: there’s the Snowe trigger, the “hair” trigger and something Senator Tom Carper, a centrist Delaware Democrat, is calling the “hammer.”

Carper is trying to build centrist unity around his idea in order to offer it as an alterative if and when the opt-out public option fails – a provision, he says, that just doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate. “We’ll see what comes out of Reid’s bill but I think at the end of the day we may need something along the lines of what I’m suggesting in order to finish debate on the bill and report [the bill] out,” Carper said.

Carper is meeting with centrists such as Joe Lieberman, Olympia Snowe, Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln asking them what kind of a trigger they might vote for. “What we’re asking centrists is: ‘What concerns do you need to have addressed to vote for cloture?’” Carper said. “And the two concerns that we hear over and over again is government run and government financed.” Both the hair trigger –which measures market penetration  (an idea panned by at least one centrist, Nelson) — and Snowe’s trigger would institute government run public options on a state-by-state basis. In order to avoid direct government involvement, Carper is suggesting a national co-op.