Sen. Chris Dodd, who shepherded one of the two Senate health care reform bills out of committee last year, after Sen. Edward Kennedy was stricken with brain cancer, sounded optimistic Monday about President Barack Obama's new attempt to craft a compromise.

 "With the release of the President’s health care plan, we are now closer than ever before to achieving meaningful and comprehensive health care reform," Dodd said in a written statement. "This proposal incorporates a lot of the hard work of the Senate and the House over the last year, and many bipartisan reform elements.

 That bipartisan cooperation has been obscured by reform opponents and underplayed by the media, according to Dodd and other supporters of reform. Dodd has repeatedly noted that his Committee on Health, Employees, Labor and Pensions considered 287 amendments in drafting its initial bill -- which was largely outweighed in negotiations by the less ambitious Finance Committee bill -- and accepted 161 amendments offered by Republicans.

 "I am looking forward to meeting with the President and leaders from both parties on Thursday to finish our job of crafting health care reform that will guarantee all Americans access to stable, quality, and affordable health care," Dodd said, referring to the summit on reform that Obama and legislative leaders from both parties plan to attend this week.

 But as has been the case through the last year, Obama has much negotiating to do within his own party. Witness the statement put out by Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, who noted that Obama's latest proposal delays by eight years but does not abandon outright the proposal to institute an excise tax on high-value health care plans in order to pay for the subsidies that will help uninsured people afford coverage. (The House bill paid for those same subsidies with a tax increase on those making $250,000 per year or more.)

 "While the proposal reflects significant progress, I continue to believe that the excise tax issue should be set aside and studied rather than imposing a tax eight years in the future," Courtney said. "Delaying the tax by nearly a decade and hoping that it doesn’t hurt working families is like throwing a dart in the dark."

 The excise tax is opposed by labor unions, though they agreed on a proposal to phase it in over time in negotiations last year. But Courtney, who led resistance to the excise tax in the House, noted a new study from the University of California at Berkeley that argues the overwhelming impact of that tax would fall not on unionized families but on others who have insurance that would be deemed high-value under the Senate plan.

 According to the Berkeley study, 80 percent of the households affected by the excise tax, which was championed by Sen. John McCain in the presidential race, would be nonunion households.

 The president and the Congress may be closer to a deal than ever before, but they've still got a long way to go before nailing down that all important question: how to pay for it.