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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, dedicated to showcasing economic and domestic initiatives and boosting Democratic senators seen as vulnerable in November's congressional polls.
He repeatedly poured praise on Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, who is responsible for steering Obama's agenda through the polarized Senate, and who is facing a tough reelection fight in Nevada.
In a nod to Nevada's current economic pain, the president chose the state to unveil a 1.5 billion dollar package of measures on Friday aimed at helping victims of the housing meltdown.
"This fund's going to help out-of-work home owners prevent preventible foreclosures," Obama said.
The plan will include help for borrowers who now owe more than their home is worth after real estate prices collapsed, and will also aid those who took out second mortgages in a desperate bid to keep their houses.
It will apply to the states worst hit by the burst of the housing bubble that have seen the price of homes drop by over 20 percent from their peak.
Obama later sought to make amends to the gamblers paradise of Las Vegas, hard hit by a tourism drought, after he upset some local officials by twice telling people in other states they should not blow their savings in Sin City.
"Let me set the record straight ... I love Vegas, always have," Obama said, to huge cheers from the city's chamber of commerce, and joked that on Thursday night he had cut the huge US budget in half by playing poker.
Obama admitted that he had drawn some "heat" by saying that people should not go to Sin City and simply blow their savings on gambling.
"It wasn't meant to be a shot," Obama said.
