Obama Urges Republicans to Do Some "Soul Searching"
The president said he knew Republican voters did not favor a plan and it would "be very hard for you politically to do this."
But he said he put on the table a number of Republican ideas that he would consider supporting and that he was urging Republicans to do "a little soul searching" to try to find Democratic proposals they could embrace.
"I don't know, frankly, whether we can close that gap," the president said, pressing Republicans to move in the direction of covering more than three million additional people, dealing with preexisting conditions and getting people out of high risk pools.
Mr. Obama acknowledged there was one way he could win over Republicans.
"I suspect that if the Democrats and the administration were willing to start over and then adopt John Boehner's bill, we'd get a whole bunch of Republican votes," he said. "I don't know how many Democratic votes we'd get, but we'd get a lot of Republican votes."
But he said Democrats were concerned that "after a year and a half, or after five decades of dealing with this issue, starting over they suspect means not doing much" or simply accepting Boehner's proposals.
Mr. Obama said he was happy with the "extraordinarily civil tone" of the discussion, adding that "the fact that we're only an hour late beats my prediction." He said both sides have some consensus in a number of areas, including insurance market reforms, allowing people and businesses to pool together and purchasing insurance across state lines, even if they don't agree on the details.
On the issue of so-called exchanges, Mr. Obama said that "previously has been an idea that was embraced by Republicans before I embraced it, and somehow suddenly it became less of a good idea."
"That is a market based approach, it is not a government approach," he said, complaining that Democrats nonetheless "still hear the same rhetoric" from the GOP about a government takeover of health care.
The president also signaled his openness to working with Republicans on medical malpractice reform, though he said he did not support hard caps on payouts.
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