Obama to chart new health care reform path next week

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama, eager to complete his historic but embattled drive to remake US health care, will next week lay out a new way forward for the reform effort, the White House said Friday.Obama, likely to speak Wednesday, has joined his top Democratic allies in the US Congress to say he hopes for Republican support but will proceed with or without their backing after vainly seeking converts in a summit this week."The president's been working on this issue for months, more than a year. So, obviously his desire is to see something that improves the lives of the American people soon," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters.Gibbs said Obama was taking into account proposals his Republican critics made at the unusual day-long summit he hosted Thursday but otherwise gave few details of what the president would say about his top domestic priority."The president's going to take the areas that there was some common agreement on and work through those ideas and those issues, and will likely make an announcement next week about the next steps forward," he said.The Senate and House of Representatives passed rival versions of the bill last year, but efforts to meld them into a compromise version that the president could sign have stalled.Gibbs would not say whether Obama would greenlight the use of a parliamentary procedure called "reconciliation" that Republicans have used more often than Democrats in the past but now denounce as an unfair tactic."I think that those questions are better left for when we have an announcement from the president on the way forward," said Gibbs.The reconciliation process appeals to Democrats, who lost their 60-seat supermajority in January and with it the ability to overcome Republican delaying tactics.It requires just 51 votes to pass bills directly tied to government finances.Republicans, who boast that none of their ranks will support the president's proposal, have attacked that approach as an abuse of Senate rules and demanded the Democrats scrap their bi

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