White House: Healthcare 95% finished

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President Barack Obama wanted an overhaul of the nation’s health-care system by the end of the old year. He didn’t get that.

But he’s close -- very close, to the way the White House wants to frame the debate. At the start of the new year, the president faces two conflicting remedies for the nation’s healthcare woes -- one which narrowly passed the House, another which cleared the Senate, both with nary a vote from Republican members of Congress (one).

Early this evening, the president will meet with Senate and House Democratic leaders at the White House as negotiations for a reconciliation of the two bills get underway. They all hope to have a bill ready for signing by February.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) will be there in person. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) will be piped in via conference call.

The White House, for its part, is attempting to focus on how much the two healthcare bills have in common -- as opposed to the gaping differences that are posing a lot of heartache among many members of the president’s party -- not to mention howls of protest from the Republican party.

The ‘public option,’ for one -- missing in the Senate bill, disputed in the House bill.

‘With Congress now needing only to combine ideas from the House and Senate versions of health insurance reform into one final bill to send the president, there is an unavoidable temptation among the media to focus on the five percent of differences between the two versions, instead of the remarkable 95 percent the bills have in common,’’ Dan Pfeiffer, the new White House communications director, writes this morning in the White House blog.

Read more in The Swamp.

-- Mark Silva