Obama pushes for embattled health care overhaul

US President Barack Obama and top Democratic lawmakers struggled Friday to rally their troops behind legislation to remake US health care, ahead of what was expected to be a razor's edge weekend vote.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House of Representatives aimed to take up the most ambitious overhaul of its kind in a half-century on Saturday, though Republican delaying tactics could cause the timing to slide.

Pelosi said lawmakers would vote "tomorrow" even as Democrats wrestled with intra-party disputes over banning government funding for abortion and over immigration issues.

Obama put off a rare planned visit to Congress from Friday to Saturday as the White House and its allies worked to collect the 218 votes needed to win House approval of the 10-year, 900-billion-dollar initiative.

The president, who has made passing the bill this year one of his top domestic priorities, assigned Vice President Joe Biden the task of reaching out to wavering lawmakers by telephone.

And the White House's independent political arm, Organizing For America, urged supporters by email to call their representatives in support of the legislation.

- The House of Representatives will vote on health insurance reform tomorrow. All signs point to it being incredibly close, possibly even coming down to a single vote - wrote OFA Director Mitch Stewart.

Republicans, united in opposing the plan, crowed privately that the last-minute scramble to schedule Obama's visit and the vote showed that Democrats were short of the 218 votes needed to pass the measure.

House Minority Leader John Boehner said the grim news that US unemployment had soared to 10.2 percent, the highest level since 1983, showed the need to freeze the health care bill in its tracks.

- This job-killing bill needs to be defeated - said Boehner.

On Thursday, the number two Republican in the House, Eric Cantor, promised several thousand protestors at the US Capitol that "not one Republican will vote for this bill."

Democrats said they were planning on approximately six total hours of debate Saturday before a vote on the legislation, but cautioned that Republicans could delay the process with parliamentary measures like motions to adjourn the proceedings.

Democratic Representative Louise Slaughter, chairwoman of the House Rules Committee that will shape the final bill and the rules for debate, said "we're all right" in the effort to reach 218 votes but declined to offer details.

Slaughter told reporters she hoped for a Saturday vote but joked she had booked not just one flight home but "three of them," one Saturday, one Sunday, and one Monday.

Even if Democrats muscle their majority into passing the measure, it still faces an uphill battle in the 100-seat Senate, where 60 votes are needed to ensure the ability to break parliamentary delaying tactics and pass it.

Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid earlier this week declined to repeat predictions that the health care overhaul will be complete in 2009, fueling speculation that the effort could slide to next year.

That would put the issue front-and-center in the 2010 mid-term elections, when one third of the Senate, the entire House of Representatives, and many US governorships are up for grabs.

The United States is the only industrialized democracy that does not ensure that all of its citizens have health care coverage, with an estimated 36 million Americans uninsured.

Yet Washington spends vastly more on health care -- both per person and as a share of national income as measured by Gross Domestic Product -- than other industrialized democracies, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The United States spent about 7,290 dollars per person in 2007, more than double what Britain, France, and Germany, with no meaningful edge in the quality of care and lags behind OECD averages in life expectancy and infant mortality.