When she meets with President Obama this morning, Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, will tell him that she doesn't share his view that legislation needs to be voted upon before the August recess -- which begins in just 16 days for the House and 22 for the Senate.

Snowe is a key moderate whose support the president would love so as to be able to claim the bill is bipartisan. Yesterday, offering a 'what's the rush?' argument she pointed out that it took President Lyndon Johnson a year and a half to pass Medicare.

But the President isn't holding back. In fact President Obama's former campaign committee, Obama for America -- now called Organizing for America and part of the Democratic National Committee -- is running a TV ad pushing health care reform in stark emotional terms. And it's targeted at Democrats.

Democrats on the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee passed a bill yesterday with no Republican support, though the administration heralded the dozens of Republican amendments added to the bill.

“While this is not a bipartisan bill, it is a bipartisan effort," said Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who has been filling in for the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., chair of the HELP Committee.

The Senate Democrats' bill is still a work in progress, needing to go through the Senate Finance Committee.

Said Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., the ranking Republican on the HELP committee, "The president had set some goals. The president said that everyone should be covered; that if you like what you have, you can keep it; that we needed to drive down the cost of health care; and that it should be paid for. That bill gets an F. It does not cover any of those things."

House Democrats introduced their plan earlier this week, which Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, called "landmark legislation" and "a defining moment for our country.”

"Inaction is not an option for us," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calf. "That is why we’re still on schedule to do what we have planned, to vote on this legislation before we leave for the August recess."

The Democrats' House version would

• require every American to have health insurance or pay a fine.

• provide subsidies to help provide health insurance to households that make less than $88,000

• and create a government run health plan to compete with private insurers to drive costs down

The House bill's estimated cost --more than $1 trillion over 10 years. paid for in part by a new surtax of up to 5.4 percent on those with incomes of over $400,000 a year.

“What we really have here is a bill that without any question will kill jobs, will limit access to health care, will raise taxes and will lead to a government takeover of health care," said Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo.

And some moderate Democrats, like Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., are concerned.

"The tax increases on small businesses and upper income people are worrisome, because you don't want to hurt job creation at a time like this," Cooper told ABC News. "It's actually an eight-percent tax on small business jobs, which is worrisome."

And this hike could put the president in the position of having to break a campaign promise that "everyone in America -- everyone -- will pay lower taxes than they would under the rates Bill Clinton had in the 1990s," as he said in New Hampshire in September 2008.

In an interview with ABC News' Dr. Timothy Johnson, the president elaborated on one way he would try to control costs: "a panel of medical experts that are making determinations about what protocols are appropriate for what diseases. There's going to be some disagreement, but if there's broad agreement that, in this situation the blue pill works better than the red pill, and it turns out the blue pills are half as expensive as the red pill, then we want to make sure that doctors and patients have that information available."

The president said that "the decisions, right now, are being made by insurance companies. And I think a whole lot of people out there are having bad experiences because they know that recommendations are coming from people who have a profit motive. Now, if I've got a panel of doctors and experts whose only motivation is making sure that we get the most bang for the buck in our health care, I think that's a situation that most Americans would feel pretty good about."

- jpt