Barack Obama speaks at the health care summit. The summit stalemate

President Barack Obama called on Democrats and Republicans to find a health care compromise in the next few weeks that has eluded them for a year — but made it clear that he’s prepared to short-circuit Senate rules to get reform passed if they fail.

“The question that I’m going to ask myself, and I’m going to ask of all of you, is, is there enough serious effort that in a month’s time, or in a few weeks time, or six weeks time, we could actually resolve something,” Obama said to close the seven-hour health care summit. “And if we can’t then I think we’ve got to go ahead and make some decisions.”


But within minutes of Obama’s remark, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made clear that he didn’t envision negotiations with the Republicans that could stretch well into April. "That's the president's timeline, not mine," Reid told POLITICO.

Still, the president’s comments seemed to suggest he was open to yet another new timetable for health care after a year of fits and starts among the Democrats party that left them short of final votes in the House and Senate.

And in fact, his remark threatened to throw off what had been an unofficial Democratic timetable to move ahead with the reconciliation process as early as next week – an effort that needs only 51 votes to pass health reform in the Senate.

Beyond a sometimes emotional closing statement from the president on the need for reform., Obama also made clear he couldn’t sign on to the Republican plan for reform, wouldn’t abandon reconciliation and had no intention of scrapping his plan – capping the seven-plus-hour session with a dig at Republicans for pitching a bill that covers just a fraction of the uninsured.

Republicans said the same thing in their closing comments that they said at 10 a.m. – start over. Obama won’t.

So the parties walked out of Blair House almost exactly the way they walked in – completely at odds over the best way to fix the health insurance system. There were modest efforts around the edges to find common ground – on reining in waste and fraud and keeping the deficit in check – but no broad agreements on the shape of reform.

The day-long session had flashes of gripping political theater, rival parties laying bare their philosophical differences on a critical issue with TV cameras rolling. At one point, Obama sparred with his ex-presidential rival John McCain. “We’re not campaigning anymore, John,” Obama said. “The election is over now.”

“I’m reminded of that every day,” McCain replied.

Obama replied, “We can spend the remainder of the time with our respective talking points, but we’re supposed to be talking about insurance.”

Other times, it had all the excitement of a legislative markup – 40 politicians in a room, all who had to have their turn to talk, on a topic where the fierceness of the exchanges was muted by the hyper-technical nature of the debate.

Obama and House Republicans leader John Boehner sparred near the end of the event, as Boehner offered an impassioned defense of the House Republican plan, which would cover 3 million of the uninsured.

Pushing the president to start over on health care, Boehner tried to pin Obama down:

"Why can't we agree on those insurance reforms that we've talked about? Why can't we come to an agreement on purchasing across state lines? Why can't we do something about the biggest cost driver, which is medical malpractice and the defensive medicine that doctors practice? Let's start with a clean sheet of paper where we can actually get somewhere and we can get it into law here in the next several months," Boehner said.

Obama shot back that the Democratic bill covers more than 30 million Americans. "John, you know, the challenge I have here, and this has happened eriodically, is every so often we have a pretty good conversation trying to get on some specifics and then we go back to the standard talking points that Democrats and Republicans have had for the last year and that doesn't drive us to an agreement on issues."

By day’s end, both sides were using closing remarks to reinforce the points they started out with.

“They have rendered a judgment about what we have intended to do so far, the solution to that is to put that on the shelf and start over with a blank piece of paper to see what we could agree on,” said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used her closing comments to say that the bill doesn’t provide federal funding for abortions. “The misrepresentation campaign that’s gone on about the bill, it’s amazing that anyone would support it,” Pelosi said.

But even as early as the lunch break, it was growing clearer that the pre-summit pessimism on both sides – that there was little to no hope of grand bipartisan compromise – was on target. In fact, both sides spent part of the first three hours of the session trying to score tactical points, rarely veering from their scripts to extend a hand to the other side.

By the afternoon, however, both sides took a more substantive approach that played to the Republicans’ benefit, given Democratic attempts to portray them as unreasonable and partisan. The turn left Democrats anxious for the more McCain-Obama moments.

Obama, who called the summit as a last-ditch effort to resuscitate his stalled reform effort, left no illusion that bipartisan comity would be easy to come by, after a year of bitter sparring between the parties on the Democratic plan.

“I don’t know that these gaps can be bridged,” he said, echoing the feeling of most people on both sides of the issue.

Yet Democrats struggled to do what they were succeeding at what they set out to do --

Obama did on several occasions argue that his bill included a variety of provisions that Republicans should be eager to endorse, saying he adopted the Republican plan to cut waste and fraud in the Medicare system in whole. “Every idea about fraud and abuse, we’ve adopted in our legislation,” Obama said.

But he also tried to call out the Republicans when they fell back on their usual tactics, noting at one point that Minority Whip Eric Cantor had a six-inch-high stack of papers in front of him. “Let me just guess, that’s the 2400 page Democratic bill,” Obama said before Cantor started speaking. “These are the kinds of political things we do that prevent us from actually having a conversation.”

Still, it took less than an hour for Democrats and Republicans to spar, clashing over who had the better ideas for reform and how it should be sent through the Congress.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), in the Republican opening remarks, urged Obama and congressional Democrats to reject using reconciliation to pass part of the health care reform bill, arguing it is a rarely-used process that’s inappropriate for such sweeping legislation.

“We will have to renounce jamming this through in a partisan way,” Alexander said. “If we don’t, the rest of what we will do today will not be relevant.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave a combative retort, saying Republicans talk about reconciliation as if it’s unusual, when in fact GOP majorities have used it more often than Democrats. “It’s as if there is a different mindset, a different set of facts than reality,” Reid said.

Obama was more measured, but the message was clear – he has no intention of taking reconciliation off the table.

“Rather than start at the outset talking about legislative process, what I suggest is we talk about the substance and how we might help the American people deal with costs, coverage, insurance, these other issues,” Obama said. “We might surprise ourselves and find out that we agree more than we disagree and that may help dictate how we move forward. It might turn out that we have too big of a gulf.”

After the contentious opening remarks, the conversation settled largely into a more wonky debate over controlling health care costs. Democrats offered anecdotes on why health care reform is needed now, while Republicans pointed out critical statements by the Congressional Budget Office and others on the Democratic health care plan.

By an hour into the summit, only six out of the more than 40 lawmakers and top administration officials present had spoken. And in fact, even the time allocation gave the two parties something to disagree on, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pointing out at around 11:45 a.m. that Republicans has 24 minutes to talk, while Democrats had 52 minutes.

“We’re going to have to be a little more disciplined in our time,” Obama nudged lawmakers from both parties, each of whom spoke for about 10 minutes.

Obama acknowledged being guilty himself, but added light-heartedly that he could do it “because I am the president.”

Democrats went into the summit wanting to show that there were many areas of agreement with Republicans – a target that congressional aides said they felt satisfied the president was hitting. Republican aides, however, said the focus on policy agreements reinforced their goal of showing the GOP is reasonable and open to reform.

But with the large number of people around the table in Blair House, the summit lacked the kind of free-wielding exchange that would allow both parties to score more rhetorical points. Each lawmaker tried to give what amounted to an opening statement on their first go-around, usually speaking for more than 10 minutes a piece. Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) spoke for the first time at 3:45 p.m.

In an another testy exchange, Obama disagreed with Alexander’s statement that the CBO had concluded that Democratic reforms will raise premiums, saying that "is just not the case."

"No, no, no, no, no," Obama responded. "This is an example of where we've got to get our facts straight. Let me respond to what you just said. Because it's not factually accurate." He said costs for families would go down, and that the CBO says families might choose to buy better coverage that would be more expensive. "They didn't say the actual premiums would be going up," he said.

“With respect, you’re wrong,” Alexander said.

Obama replies: "I'm pretty certain I'm not wrong. ... I promise you we'll get this settled before the day's out."

The CBO found that premiums would be reduced for some policyholders, while others would see increases, depending on whether they buy insurance on the individual or group market. But the reason why some people would see their costs rise is because they would choose to buy more comprehensive insurance plans that would inevitably be more expensive.

Right from the start, Republicans hammered their central theme: the president and lawmakers have to start over.

“We have to start by putting the current bill on the shelf and starting with a clean sheet of paper,” Alexander said, as Obama looked on and jotted down some notes.

He also pushed back on the White House notion of a comprehensive bill – “we don’t do comprehensive well. Our country is too big, too complicated for Washington to write all the rules.”

The American people “have tried to say in every way they know how, that they opposed the health care that passed the senate on Christmas Eve, and more important, we want to talk about, we think we have a better idea, and that is to take many of the examples you’ve just mentioned about reducing health care costs,. . .and start over, and let’s go step by step through that goal,” Alexander said.

Pelosi (D-Calif.) was the first Democrat to reject the call.

Struggling families, she said, "don’t have time for us to start over. Many of them are at the end of the line with their insurance.”