'Show me what you got': Obama to Republicans on health care

HENDERSON, Nevada — President Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet to Republicans on health care Friday, saying "show me what you got," a week before a televised summit on his deadlocked political priority.Obama challenged his political foes to come up with a cheaper, more effective and expansive alternative to his health plan which is stuck in Congress and is falling prey to Republican stalling tactics."The Republicans say they have got a better way of doing it. I want them to put it on the table," Obama said at a town hall meeting in the desert state of Nevada."As I told them a while back, I am not an unreasonable guy.""I'll just grab your idea and say great and take all the credit. Show me what you got."Obama has called top Republican and Democratic leaders to a meeting next Thursday for a live televised forum on health care.Some Republicans appear to believe that the event is an elaborate trap designed to brand them as obstructionists and to make political hay in the run-up to the mid-term congressional elections in November.The opposition party is setting out its own battle lines on health care, arguing that its proposals have been public for some time, and saying Obama is insincere in his promise to work with them."If the president?s intention for the health care summit is to finally show that he is ready to listen and work in a bipartisan way to produce incremental reforms that the American people support, he is off to a rocky start," said House of Representatives Republican minority whip Eric Cantor.Republicans have called on Obama to promise not to use a process called "reconciliation" to pass the bill through the Senate.The maneuver would need only a simple majority vote instead of the 60 votes required to thwart filibuster Republican delaying tactics -- which Democrats currently do not have.Reconciliation is a tactic designed to ensure filibusters cannot block a vital budget issue or effort to reduce the deficit.Obama was at the end of a two-day tour through western states Colorado and Nevada,

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