President Barack Obama has called on Congress to continue working toward health reform legislation that would bring coverage to the uninsured and halt the worst practices of the insurance industry.

"If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know," Obama said Jan. 27 in his State of the Union address.

After being seemingly on the brink of passage, health-care reform stalled after the election of a Republican in the mid-January special election in Massachusetts to fill the Senate seat held for years by the late Edward M. Kennedy. The Democrats' loss of the seat stole their filibuster-proof, 60-seat supermajority and gave Republicans enough votes to block most legislation in the chamber.

Republicans have been unanimously opposed to the Democrats' health-care bills. At the time of the election, Democrats had been in the process of reconciling the bills passed by the House and Senate.

In his speech, Obama cited a Congressional Budget Office report finding that the Democrat's legislation would reduce the deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next two decades and noted that "many doctors, nurses and health-care experts who know our system best consider this approach a vast improvement over the status quo."

If reform isn't passed, he warned, millions more Americans will lose their health insurance, deficits will continue to rise and premiums will continue to go up.

"Here's what I ask Congress, though: Don't walk away from reform. Not now. Not when we are so close. Let us find a way to come together and finish the job for the American people," Obama said.

Despite his vow to continue working for reform, pundits were quick to note that the focus of the speech was on job creation and that it was well into his more than hour-long speech before the president even mentioned health-care reform, which had been the primary legislative focus of his first year in office.

And what form health reform will now take or how scaled down it might become remains unclear. Still, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said on the CNN program "State of the Union" that passing a health-care bill was "still inside the five-yard line." And, on NBC's "Meet the Press" Jan. 31, David Axelrod, senior adviser to the president, denied a comment by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) that health-care reform was on "life support."

The administration's designs for health reform also were reflected in the release this week of the fiscal year 2011 budget proposal, in which Obama wrote about the fight "to reform our nation's broken health insurance system and relieve this unsustainable burden."

"My budget includes funds to lay the groundwork for these reforms -- by investing in health information technology, patient-centered research and prevention and wellness -- as well as to improve the health of the nation by increasing the number of primary care physicians, protecting the safety of our food and drugs and investing in critical biomedical research," Obama wrote in his budget message to Congress.

The bulk of the $911 billion Department of Health and Human Services portion of the budget, an increase of $51 billion over 2010, would go toward Medicare for the elderly and disabled and Medicaid for the poor. (Medicare accounts for 51 percent of the department budget; Medicaid, 33 percent.)

But, according to a summary released by HHS, the administration's budget also includes:

• An additional $290 million to expand community health centers, including the creation of 25 new ones, which provide primary medical services to the medically underserved, including the uninsured, enabling them to see 20 million more patients
• An additional $261 million for research efforts at the Agency for HealthCare Research, including "patient-centered health research," which compares various medical treatments to see which ones work best
• $169 million to the National Health Service Corps, which places physicians, nurse practitioners and dentists in medically underserved areas to improve access to primary care, bringing the total to 8,500 clinicians

The budget also includes an additional $25.5 billion in Medicaid funding through a six-month extension of the temporary increase in the federal Medicaid match to states that was part of the Recovery Act. The extension would go through June 2011.

To read more about the administration's budget proposal, visit the White House or the Health and Human Services Web site.