House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., left, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., right, Rep.... 
(Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo)
The House bill includes a proposal for a so-called health benefit advisory committee, which would include 25 people appointed by the president and the surgeon general to determine benefit eligibility.
"The decisions, right now, are being made by insurance companies. And I think a whole lot of people out there are having bad experiences because they know that recommendations are coming from people who have a profit motive," the president said in an interview with ABC News' Dr. Tim Johnson Wednesday. "If I've got a panel of doctors and experts whose only motivation is making sure that we get the most bang for the buck in our health care, I think that's a situation that most Americans would feel pretty good about."
As part of a comprehensive reform and to cut costs over the long term, the president argues that more emphasis needs to be put on luring more doctors into family medicine practices.
"Those people who don't have access to primary care physicians are going to the emergency room where we're giving them the most expensive care, and all of us are subsidizing that," Obama said. "I want to make sure that in the final bill that I sign there are strong incentives to help primary care physicians."
The president said the program to change primary care is unlikely to start until 2013. That may be five years away, but Obama wants lawmakers to "buck up" and move quickly with legislation in Congress.
"We can do what we've done for so long and defer tough decisions for another day -- or we can step up and meet our responsibilities. In other words, we can lead," Obama said in a speech Wednesday.
But he has not indicated which Democratic plan he prefers.
"Both proposals will take what's best about our system today and make it the basis of our system tomorrow," he said.
If lawmakers succeed in passing the bills in the House and Senate this summer, the tougher challenge will come in the fall, when they would try to resolve differences between the two versions of the bill. Congressional Democrats are deeply divided on key details, including whether to create a new government-run health insurance program and how to pay for it all.
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