Welcome to the final part of “Battle at the Blair House,” the bipartisan health care summit. You can watch it live on C-Span 3 here, or via the embedded video.

The meeting will be divided into four segments:

Controlling costs – introduced by the President

Insurance reforms – introduced by Secretary Sebelius

Reducing the deficit – introduced by the Vice President

Expanding coverage – introduced by the President

This is part four, which should be focussed on expanding coverage, part one’s liveblog can be found here, part two is here, part three is here.

3:52 – Obama says the tax credits to expand coverage will probably be the most difficult part to reach an agreement. Says that if we decide as a society that we are going to cover the uninsured we will need to find a way to pay for it.

3:54- Republican John Barrasso says every thinks this bill will make your health care worse and your insurance cost more. Claims the people with catastrophic plans (under insured) are the best consumers of health care.

3:59 – Obama ask Barrasso if he would be satisfied if every member of congress only had catastrophic care coverage. Barrasso said yes. (I think I smell a making of a great popular bipartisan bill to cut Congress member’s insurance benefits.)

4:02 – Waxman wonders if Republican want Medicare turned into catastrophic only coverage. Says seniors should be worried if we don’t do anything and Paul Ryan gets his way with turning all of Medicare into vouchers.

Waxman “we need to hold down the cost by bringing everyone into the system.” If we adopted the Republican plan we would only cover 3 million instead of 30 million, not hold down the deficit, or end pre-existing conditions.

4:10 – Republican Peter Roskam says his district does not like the bill. He disagrees with coverage expansion through Medicaid. Calls it a house of cards. (too bad it is so much more cost effective than forcing people to buy private insurance.)

4:16 – Obama again ask the Republicans if they are willing to support any increase coverage beyond the 3 million in House Republican bill.  Says he would prefer to have people covered in the exchange instead of Medicaid. (Why did this bill not do it, Because the private insurance exchange is roughly 40% less cost effective than Medicaid and would be extremely wasteful.)

4:20 – Democrat Chris Dodd thinks it is ironic that in this country we provide people with a lawyer if they are charged with murder but not health care. 14,000 Americans lost their health care today. Dodd claims that you can’t get to affordability and economic issues without dealing with expanded coverage.

4:24 – Republican Joe Barton says there is a fundamental difference between the Republicans and the Democrats on health care.  Says what we really need is insurance across state lines and tort reform not “mandates” defining the minimum requires for “insurance.” We need to start over.

4:29 – Obama says there is nothing radical about this Democratic bills. Most everyone’s with insurance right now gets the same insurance.

4:30 – Democrat Ron Wyden for the last 6 hours we have heard Republicans talk only about incremental reform and Democrats talk about comprehensive reform. Says numerous studies and history says that incremental reform just ends up cost more. Wyden says we need to stay in the fight until everyone can select on insurance provider like members of Congress do.

4:34 – Republican Mitch McConnell says the polls show Americans oppose this bill by overwhelming margins. Americans have followed this debate and want to start over with a blank sheet of paper.

4:37 – Obama counters that many individual provision poll very well (Some individual provision poll extremely badly though.)

4:39 – Patty Murray tells the story of a little boy who’s money died from a lack of insurance. The bill is important because it finally gives people with no choices, choices on the exchange.

4:41 – Republican Tom Coburn says the key goal is to reconnect the mechanism of payment with purchase.

4:44 – Democrat Charles Rangel Americans wonder “why does it take 60 to get a majority?” Says people are not concerned with the debate they are concerned with what we produce. “I have no clue how many pages the Medicare bill was”  and don’t think people in the emergency room will care

4:48 – Democrat John Dingell the reason people don’t have health care in this country is because they can’t afford it. We need to buckle down and get to the business of solving this countries biggest problem. Sell insurance across state lines will cause a race to the bottom. Why are being so fussy about having decision made in the House and the Senate made by a simple majority.

4:56 – Democrat Nancy Pelosi we want a public option and came a long way to a Republican idea of exchanges. She lets Tom Coburn know that they already adopted reform to deal with quality purchasing instead of quantity. There is no public funding of abortions in these bills and this bill does not cut Medicare benefits.

This will take courage to do. Social security was hard and Medicare was hard. The American people understand their should be an end of pre-existing conditions and the Republican bill does not.

5:00 – Obama we agree that we need some insurance market reforms even if we don’t agree on all of them. The ones not included in the Republican bill but included in the Democratic bill are popular. Asks Republicans to look at the bill’s insurance reforms and honestly ask which ones they think the American people should not get.

The idea of the exchange is not a government take over it is how a market works.

Says the idea of purchasing insurance across state lines is already in the bill. The Republican version of the bill will produce a “race to the bottom.” The same thing happened in the credit card market.

This is not a government take over but just common sense consumer protections. The government does consumer protections in all parts of life.

The exchange is a market base approach. They attacked the public option as a government takeover and when that was dropped they attacked the bill with the same rhetoric. Republicans seemed to like exchanges until I embraced it.

It does not seem the differences can be bridge on how we expand coverage. A report came out showing majority of Americans are already getting public health insurance. We would love to have a five page bill if we could. (you could “Medicare for all”)

Obama points out there is a lot of Republican ideas in the bill that Obama supports. It was many Republican ideas that we adopted like Medpac which were attacked as the government takeover of health care.

Ask the Republicans to do some soul searching to see if they can come up with any ideas on how to get coverage for 30 million Americans. He thinks that divided might not be bridgeable. Politically speaking agreeing to bipartisan reform might be very tough for Republicans.

We can not have another year long debate about this. (We should not even have had a year long debate period.)

Only running over time by an hour and a half the summit finally ends. As expect it is unlikely to produce a bipartisan agreement.