House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the new reconciliation package she wants the full House of Representatives to pass in a few days includes greater insurance reforms and warned that insurance companies will be “poisoning the well” with “misrepresentations” and “misinterpretations” designed to kill the bill.

Nancy Pelosi

“The insurance companies will do anything to stop this legislation,” Pelosi said at a press conference today (March 18), where she announced the Congressional Budget Office estimate that her health care reform bill will cost $940 billion in the first decade. The speaker, a Democrat from California, focused on the savings, which the nonpartisan CBO estimated would be about $138 billion to the federal deficit in the first decade.

Pelosi said the reconciliation bill, the product of weeks of negotiation and debate among Democratic-led House and Senate leadership, focuses on a handful of areas that differ from the Senate’s bill. They include providing more affordability options to the middle class, eliminating the inequities in Medicaid funding for all states, closing the gap between what Medicare coverage for prescription drugs and when catastrophic coverage kicks in (the so-called doughnut hole), and greater insurance reforms.

“We didn’t think the Senate bill went far enough on insurance reforms,” Pelosi said. “We played on [the insurance companies’] turf….Now, they will be playing on the turf of the American people.”

The text of the reconciliation bill was expected to be released later today, with the House expected to vote on the bill Sunday afternoon. Procedures prohibit a vote before 72 hours after a final bill is released.

President Barack Obama delayed a trip to Indonesia to allow him to work on passage of the health care reform legislation through the weekend, according to his press secretary, Robert Gibbs. The trip was scheduled to begin March 20.

Gibbs also said Obama would sign a bill that reached him, even if House Democrats use the “deem and pass” rule, whereby legislators would not take a formal vote on the bill, thus permitting them to campaign this year without a record of consent or dissent on the controversial bill. Gibbs also said he expects the bill to pass in the House and Senate, and that the president continues to call on legislators, seeking their support.