WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton urged Senate Democrats on Tuesday to pass health-care legislation by year's end, pointedly telling skittish lawmakers that an imperfect bill is preferable to another failure like the one he and the party endured in 1994.

"It's not important to be perfect here. It's important to act, to move, to start the ball rolling," the former president told reporters after the closed-door meeting, held on the cusp of Senate debate on intensely controversial legislation. The House cleared its version of the bill late Saturday night on a narrow, party-line vote of 220-215.

Clinton made an unusual visit to the party's weekly closed-door caucus meeting at the invitation of Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who has said he hopes the Senate can vote on a bill before the year is out and took a step during the day to allow debate to begin as early as next week.

Aides said Reid has yet to receive final information from the Congressional Budget Office on the costs and coverage implications of the still-secret legislation he submitted more than two weeks ago. As soon as he does, he intends to launch a historic debate on legislation to expand coverage to millions who lack it, crack down on insurance industry practices and curb the rise in health-care spending nationally.

Several Democrats who attended the meeting with Clinton said the former president did not express an opinion on many of the controversial issues embedded in the health-care debate.

These range from calls for a government-run insurance option to the availability of abortion coverage in private and government insurance.

"He wasn't asked that and he didn't volunteer to solve Sen. Reid's immediate problems," said Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md.

Instead, several Democrats said, Clinton told them that expanding health care is good policy, and at the same time the best politics.

"He did address it, essentially to say, 'You're going to do it, and then people are going to begin to see that none of the bad things people are talking about will come to pass,'" said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said the former president reflected on his own experience on the issue and told Democrats that "we got lost in the magnitude of the problem, and in search for a more perfect answer I lost the fight."

Clinton's attempt to enact nationwide health coverage collapsed in dramatic fashion in 1994 without ever coming to a vote in either house, and is widely cited as a contributing factor in the Democrats' loss of control of Congress in that year's midterm elections.