Health summit: Heated talk, little agreement

WASHINGTON — With tempers flaring, President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans clashed in an extraordinary live-on-TV summit Thursday over the right prescription for the nation's broken health care system, talking of agreement but holding to long-entrenched positions that leave them far apart.

"We have a very difficult gap to bridge here," said Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican. "We just can't afford this. That's the ultimate problem."

With Cantor sitting in front of a giant stack of nearly 2,400 pages representing the Democrats' Senate-passed bill, Obama said cost is a legitimate question, but he took Cantor and other Republicans to task for using political shorthand and props "that prevent us from having a conversation."

And so it went, hour after hour at Blair House, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.

Obama and his Democratic allies argued that a sweeping health overhaul is imperative for the nation's future economic vitality. With the marathon policy debate available from start to finish to a divided public, Obama cast the health care crisis as "one of the biggest drags on our economy," tying his top domestic priority to the issue that's even more pressing to many Americans.

"This is the last chance, as far as I'm concerned," Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y.

Obama lamented partisan bickering that has resulted in a stalemate over legislation to extend coverage to more than 30 million people who are now uninsured. "Politics I think ended up trumping practical common sense," he said.

And yet, even as he pleaded for cooperation — "actually a discussion, and not just us trading talking points" — he insisted on a number of Democratic points and acknowledged agreement may not be possible. "I don't know that those gaps can be bridged," Obama said. "If not, at least we will have better clarified for the American people what the debate is all about."

With hardened positions well staked out before the meeting, the president and his Democratic allies prepared to move on alone. Politically, it would be an all-or-nothing gamble in a midterm election year for Democrats bent on achieving a goal that has eluded lawmakers for a half-century.