Obama begins health care push

WASHINGTON -- President Obama, faced with dimming prospects that Congress will meet his August deadline to pass health care legislation, steps into the chaotic debate this week to push Congress to act and reassure Americans that they will not end up paying more for less.

His leadership will have to go a long way.

Politicians from both parties have said they want to fix a health care system that costs families too much money, often provides inadequate care and leaves tens of millions uninsured.

But after months of negotiations, members of Congress still can't agree on details of — or how to pay for — a $1 trillion plan to overhaul the system.

Disagreements over whether to tax employer-sponsored benefits and how much to tax the rich to pay for the plan escalated last week while Obama was overseas.

"The good news is that everybody's still at the table," says Ken Thorpe of the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease. But "the timeline is tough."

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., was less optimistic Sunday. "There's no chance it's going to be done" by the August vacation, he told ABC's This Week.

Obama sought that deadline based on the belief that come fall, members of Congress will be focused on re-election campaigns and won't want to work on potentially controversial legislation.

Near the end of last week's trip to Russia, Italy and Ghana, Obama told reporters that he doesn't consider August a "do-or-die" deadline. But "I really want to get it done by the August recess."

That doesn't mean he'll try to dictate the terms of the deal.

Despite a lack of consensus over cost, funding and whether to provide a "public" government insurance plan that would compete with private companies, Obama's Health and Human Services secretary said Sunday that the White House will not micromanage Congress. Any plan to overhaul the system "needs to be owned by the House and the Senate," Kathleen Sebelius told CNN's State of the Union.

Some analysts question that strategy. "The White House has trusted delegation as their political strategy; they're leaving it to the legislators," says Darrell West, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution think tank. "I think the White House really needs to show leadership, and I think if they did that many Democrats would follow."