US President Barack Obama, pressing for passage of his historic health care overhaul this month, was to court key House Democrats in closed-door talks at the White House on Thursday.
Facing doubts about his strategy, Obama was to meet for an hour with 11 representatives from the party's progressive wing, followed by talks with seven centrists, his press office said in a hastily announced schedule update.
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicted at her weekly press conference that Congress would ultimately approve the far-reaching legislation but warned that she was not taking any Democratic votes for granted.
"Every vote, every legislative vote is a heavy lift around here. You assume nothing, assume nothing in terms of where you were before and where people may be now," she told reporters.
Pelosi declined to set a timetable for a House vote, but White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told MSNBC television "we on scheduled to get something done before we leave" for Australia on March 18.
Obama was piling pressure on lawmakers to sign on to his strategy, which calls for the House to abandon the legislation it approved in November and pass the Senate's version, coupled with "fixes" to that bill.
"I therefore ask leaders in both houses of Congress to finish their work and schedule the vote in the next few weeks. From now until then, I will do everything in my power to make the case for reform," he said Wednesday.
Looking to show that the White House is pressing all parties, Gibbs said on the micro-blogging site Twitter that Obama had walked into Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's talks with insurance company executives with a letter from a woman whose premiums will rise 40-percent in 2011.
Sebelius said before those talks that she had "received letters from Americans across the country who have seen their health insurance premiums skyrocket and are desperate for relief."
"These Americans want to know why their premiums continue to skyrocket, what we can do to control health care costs and how we can fix our broken health insurance system," she said.
Copyright 2010  AFP Global Edition
