As Democrats start figuring out exactly what they are going to put into a re-designed health care reform bill, they also have before them an extraordinarily difficult legislative assignment to actually get a plan to the President's desk.

The White House says President Obama is likely this week to chart out a plan for how to get health reform through the Congress, possibly adjusting some of his ideas based on last week's health care summit.

"The President is 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," said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs last Friday.

Meanwhile on the Sunday talk shows, Democratic leaders were talking confidently about getting a plan through the Congress, even though they will have to do a lot of work to round up the last few votes, especially in the House.

The larger issue though is what kind of changes Democrats may try to pack into the arcane budget process known as "reconciliation", which is supposed to be limited to

As of now, Democrats say the House would have to take the first step, by approving the health reform bill that passed the Senate on December 24 of last year.

Lots of House Democrats don't like provisions in that bill, but their leaders say it will all be fixed in the second bill, which is the budget reconciliation measure.

That would have to go through both the House and the Senate.  In the Senate, no filibuster would be allowed - but Republicans believe they have the right to unlimited amendments, even though debate time is limited to 20 hours.

The question about reconciliation has been whether the Senate's rules would allow all kinds of legislative language that do not have a direct "fiscal" impact - in other words, they aren't budget, tax or spending related, but deal with the broader architecture of the health care system.

Republicans say you can't do that, but many Democrats argue that's not the case, pointing to past GOP uses of reconciliation.

As I show in one of my other blogs this morning, there is a lot of evidence that you can stuff a lot of related items into a reconciliation bill which do not have a direct fiscal effect.

This week, we could see the White house issue another health care plan, modified with some of the items discussed in last week's Health Care Summit.

Congress now has a four week run until a Congressional break for Easter.  We'll see how far the Democrats can really get with this health reform run in coming days.