President Obama heads to Ohio on Monday to push for a health care overhaul.
Obama is set to deliver an address on health insurance in Strongsville, outside Cleveland.
The president will spend time “going through why reform is important, going through what it will do the minute he signs the legislation on behalf of millions of Americans, discussing what happens, again, if we decide now is not the time,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said at a news briefing Friday.
Obama has called on Congress to cast a final vote on the health care bill and end what has become a vitriolic, yearlong debate over his top domestic priority. The president delayed a trip to Indonesia and Australia for three days to help congressional Democratic leaders find the votes, saying the problems facing consumers and the health care industry will worsen without reform.
The Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives is trying to round up the votes needed to approve the health care bill the Senate passed in December.
The House approved its own health care bill in November. But since a special election in Massachusetts gave Republicans an additional Senate seat necessary to filibuster any further health care votes, the Democrats now want the House to approve the Senate bill and use budget reconciliation rules in the Senate to approve some of the changes House members want made.
Budget reconciliation bills can’t be filibustered, and Republicans have attacked the plan as a parliamentary trick.
Budget reconciliation rules have been used to pass more than 20 major bills in the past two decades, including the Bush administration’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.
The Senate bill would extend health insurance coverage to about 31 million of the roughly 46 million people who don’t have it, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It has a net price tag of $875 billion over 10 years but would reduce federal deficits by about $118 billion over 10 years, the CBO reported last week.
Some polls show a majority of Americans have turned against the Obama administration’s effort to get a bill through Congress, though individual elements of the plan remain widely popular.
The House bill passed a more liberal health care bill on a 220-215 vote. Some Democrats who supported that bill have said the Senate version doesn’t do enough to ensure that federal funds can’t be used to cover abortion, while others have complained the legislation doesn’t go far enough to cover the uninsured.
Read the original article from CNN Health.