Following up on comments from his recent State of the Union address, President Barack Obama took responsibility for the rocky path of comprehensive health reform, urging Democrats to continue the fight and welcoming Republicans to voice their ideas.

Barack Obama

Speaking at the Senate Democratic Policy Committee conference in Washington, D.C., Obama urged attendees “to finish the job on health care” after nearly a year of negotiations in the House and Senate to craft reform bills.

Responding to a question from Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado on how to fix the divide between the parties, the president stressed the need to be more transparent on all issues, specifically health care.

Stating that “the process looked painful and messy,” Obama cited the input from both parties and the American people on moving reform as far as it has come so far.

“On the other hand – and I take some fault for this – at the end of the process when we were fighting through all these filibusters and trying to get it done quickly so that we could pivot and start talking about other issues that were so important to the American people, some of that transparency got lost,” he said. “And I think we paid a price for it.”

Obama stressed it was important “to constantly have our cards out on the table and welcome challenges and welcome questions.”

As he did in the State of the Union and at a meeting of House Republicans in Baltimore, Md. two days later, the president again welcomed ideas from the other party that will help the American people in the end.

“I told them, I said, ‘Why would I want to get a bunch of lumps on my head doing the hard thing if you’ve got the easy thing?’” he said. “But you’ve got to show me, you’ve got to prove to me that it actually works, because I’ve talked to every health care expert out there and it turns out if you want to reform the insurance system, if you want to make sure that people without pre-existing conditions are able to get insurance, if you want to provide coverage for people, if you want to bend the cost curve, then you need a comprehensive bill, because this is a complicated area involving one-sixth of our economy.”