Debate in the House is expected to begin this week, and the Senate will soon take up its version. Democratic leaders and senior White House officials are sounding increasingly confident that Mr. Obama will sign legislation overhauling the nation’s health care system — a goal that has eluded American presidentsfor decades.After months of plodding work by five Congressional committees and weeks of back-room bargaining by Democratic leaders, President Obama’s arms-length strategy on health care appears to be paying dividends, with the House and the Senate poised to take up legislation to insure nearly all Americans.

The Senate Finance Committee chairman, Max Baucus of Montana, described “a sense of inevitability, the sense that, yes, we’re going to pass health reform.” In interviews, senior advisers to the president said the progress on Capitol Hill vindicated Mr. Obama’s strategy of leaving the details up to lawmakers, though they are wary of sounding overconfident.
Five separate measures are now pared down to two. But the legislative progress has come at a price. In the absence of specific guidance from the White House, it has moved ahead in fits and starts. From here on, the challenges will only grow more difficult.
“He is making the case to them that this isn’t the exact bill you’d write, however, let’s take a step back and look at what we’re about to do here, and what a historic moment this will be,” said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting.In the Senate, where Democrats will need support from every member of their caucus to reach a critical 60-vote threshold to avoid a potential filibuster, Mr. Obama’s hands-off strategy carries particular risks. Without clear direction from the president on the public option, the Democratic leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, moved ahead last week on his own, unveiling a bill that includes a government-run plan, but allows states to opt out.
Mr. Obama said early on that he would not repeat the mistakes of Mr. Clinton, who wrote his own detailed plan, only to see it fall flat on Capitol Hill. Instead, the president set out broad principles — an approach that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, acknowledged at a rally last week, when she thanked Mr. Obama for “the intellectual contributions” he had made to the legislation.The president’s distance caught Congressional Democrats by surprise. It took them months to realize that Mr. Obama would not weigh in on some issues, like the precise shape of a government insurance plan. One House Democrat called it a “a laissez-faire strategy.”
But in an interview in his West Wing office on Friday evening, Mr. Emanuel — joined by other top members of Mr. Obama’s health care team — disputed that characterization. He said the White House had given “leeway to legislators to legislate,” but “not leeway to take a policy off track.”Congressional Democrats said it often seemed as if the top priority for the White House was simply to advance health care bills to the next step in the legislative process.
Indeed, that is exactly what White House officials were trying to do. They described their legislative strategy as a very step-by-step process, in which they kept intensely focused on the next specific goal: passing a bill out of this or that committee, resolving the doubts of particular lawmakers, like the liberals who met with Mr. Obama on Thursday.Yet White House officials have shown little interest in Republicans, with the exception of Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, whom they have wooed assiduously, and one or two others. Mr. Obama did meet with some Republicans early on, when his aides still believed it was possible to get the support of Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee.
“White House officials don’t want one or don’t know how to do one,” Mr. Alexander said.
(Edited By Mark)
(source: www.nytimes.com)