This latest program will allow owners to sell for less than they owe and will give them a little cash to speed them on their way.

More than 5 million households are behind on their mortgages and risk foreclosure. The government’s $75 billion mortgage modification plan has helped only a small slice of them. Consumer advocates, economists and even some in the banking industry say much more is needed.

For the administration, there is also the concern that millions of foreclosures could delay or reverse the economy’s tentative recovery — the last thing it wants in an election year.

Taking effect on April 5, the program could encourage hundreds of thousands of delinquent borrowers who have not been rescued by the loan modification program to shed their houses through a process known as a short sale, in which property is sold for less than the balance of the mortgage. Lenders will be compelled to accept the arrangement, forgiving the difference between the property’s market price and what they are owed.

“We want to streamline and standardize the short sale process to make it much easier on the borrower and much easier on the lender,” said Seth Wheeler, a Treasury senior adviser.

Should the incentives prove successful, the program could have multiple benefits. For the investment pools that own many home loans, there is the prospect of getting more money with a sale than with a foreclosure.

For the borrowers, there is the likelihood of suffering less damage to credit ratings. And as part of the transaction, they will get the lender’s assurance that they will not later be sued for an unpaid mortgage balance.

For communities, the plan will mean fewer empty foreclosed houses waiting to be sold by banks.

DetNews.com - State Sen. Hansen Clarke, D-Detroit, said today he’s running for Congress to try to create jobs, setting up what could turn into another feisty primary fight for Democratic Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick.

“I want to bring prosperity back here,” Clarke said in an interview. “I want to help create new jobs and help people reduce their debt and save their homes.

“We need a person in Congress who can create jobs in the region.”

Clarke, born in Detroit, represents more than half of the 13th Congressional District, which stretches from Grosse Pointe Woods through Detroit to Wyandotte.

Kilpatrick, Michigan’s only member of the House Appropriations Committee, has not filed for re-election, and her campaign didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry about her plans.

The 64-year-old congresswoman has rarely missed votes in this Congress — 3.6 percent — and nearly always votes with the Democratic leadership, according to data compiled by the Washington Post.

First elected in 1996, Kilpatrick was recently in headlines when the House ethics committee cleared her of wrongdoing over two trips she made to the Caribbean for a trade summit.

In 2008, the veteran congresswoman experienced backlash from the text-messaging scandal engulfing her son, Kwame Kilpatrick, then Detroit’s mayor. She found herself in a nail-biter of a three-way primary fight. She won, but with only 39 percent of the vote.

The 53-year-old Clarke, who is term-limited out of the Michigan Senate, will open a congressional campaign office this week.

According to his Web site biography, Clarke grew up in a working class neighborhood on Detroit’s lower east side. He was 8 years old when his father died, and his mother supported him as a school crossing guard.

His artistic ability landed him a scholarship at Cornell University, where he received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in painting. He went on to earn a law degree from Georgetown University.

Elected to the Michigan House three times, Clarke defeated incumbent state Sen. Ray Murphy in 2002. Clarke was re-elected to the Senate in 2006.

Asked about the challenge of ousting an incumbent congresswoman, Clarke pointed to his defeat of the incumbent Murphy. He also dismissed campaign money advantages of incumbency.

He said he’s raised “thousands,” and expects to have no trouble raising enough money to defeat an incumbent.

Kilpatrick has raised $313,023 in this election cycle, according to her Federal Election Commission filings, and has $346,811 in available cash.

Clarke said he’ll work to help businesses get loans. He also said that Michigan employers seek foreign skilled workers because of a lack of skilled workers in the state. He proposes drawing more heavily on community colleges to better prepare Michigan residents to be able to fill such jobs.

A 24-year-old woman was arrested about 5 a.m. Friday after Tifanee Crews died and four other pedestrians were injured. Police tell The Grand Rapids Press they expect to present their findings to prosecutors Saturday, and the suspect likely will be arraigned Monday.

Police say about 20 people were fighting outside a bar about 2 a.m. when the driver of a Cadillac drove onto a sidewalk and struck two people, then turned onto another street and hit Crews and two others. Police say the driver was involved in the fight but did not elaborate.

The four others who were struck were treated at area hospitals and released.

Temperatures reached nearly 50 degrees in some parts of Metro Detroit for a second day, and winter-weary residents flocked outdoors to bask in the welcome thaw.

On Detroit’s Belle Isle, families walked along the waters of the Detroit River and children climbed colorful playscapes. Countless cyclists could be seen circling the island perimeter.

At Campus Martius, visitors took advantage of the final day of the ice rink, which will close after Sunday until next winter season in November.

Edward Jung, 55, circled the rink on hockey skates with his 23-year-old daughter, Kelly Jung. The father said this is the first time this season he’s been able to doff his winter coat at the rink.

“Now that it’s warmer, I wish it would stay open,” Jung, of Southgate, said.

Warmer weather is also expected to stay in the southeastern Michigan region this week, with high temperatures reaching 51 degrees on Monday, 51 on Tuesday, 46 on Wednesday and 49 on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service.

Though spring officially arrives March 20, meteorologists warn that past years suggest it may be too early to rule out another snowfall.

The events are sponsored by Greyheart Greyhound Rescue and Adoption of Michigan, which cares for greyhounds after their racing careers end.

Time and locations are: 1-4 p.m. Sunday at the Canton PetCo, 43435 Ford Road; noon-4 p.m. March 14 at the Eastpointe PetCo, 22631 Gratiot Road; 12:30-4:30 p.m. March 14 at Celebrity Pets, Laurel Park Place, 37700 W. Six Mile, Livionia.

Here, the brown trout draw anglers from all over the state and can be up to 24 inches long. Reeling in one of those monsters is the catch of a lifetime for many.

Like thousands of spots around Michigan, however, this place is being threatened by an orphan site — an old industrial property that is contaminated, but which has no private ownership liable for the cleanup. And state funds that have been used to clean up these sites are nearly gone.

Just upstream from Two-Foot Bend, in the waters of Perry Creek, contaminants like chromium, nickel, chlorides and tetrachloroethylene have begun to creep in — all courtesy of the abandoned Hoskins Manufacturing site a half-mile northwest.

Orphan sites like Hoskins come in all forms: from an abandoned mine in southern Iron County, to a vacated finishing and stamping operation in Grand Rapids, to a gutted auto parts plant in northwest Detroit. And they present a host of problems that include tainted groundwater and air while becoming roadblocks to redevelopment.

Michigan has more than 4,000 such sites, and those are the ones the state’s environmental officials know about. With the state’s economic crunch and the flight of industry to other parts of the world, the number of orphan sites is growing, but the resources to deal with them are not.

To address all of the sites completely — including everything from remediation and long-term monitoring — would cost the state at least $10 billion.

In the last two decades, Michigan has funded cleanup and monitoring of orphan sites through a program called Part 201 — named for its section of the Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act. Michigan residents put more than $1.3 billion into the program through two bond issues, one in 1988 and another a decade later.

This year, the last of that money will run out, and there is no move under way in Michigan to refill the coffers. For the people who treasure spots like Two-Foot Bend, that’s a frightening scenario.

“This truly is God’s country,” said Tom Buhr, who lives nearby in Luzerne. “It’s beautiful and we need to preserve it.”

Blight

Longtime Detroiters know it as Fisher Body 21, but the glory of the plant’s days in the auto industry is hard to see now. Northbound drivers on Interstate 75 coming toward the Interstate 94 interchange are confronted by its six stories of crumbling concrete, steel and graffiti.

“The perception of Detroit suffers because of properties like this,” said Donelle Wilkins, executive director of Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, a citizens group that advocates for cleaner and healthier communities. “People come through these areas and say how dirty Detroit is and talk about our people. ‘Why can’t they clean up their neighborhoods?’ ”

Architect Albert Kahn designed the block-long plant, and construction wrapped up in 1919. Fisher Body Co., an arm of General Motors Corp., was the first tenant, and auto stamping was the name of the game for most of the following 65 years. The process creates chromium solvents and plating, as well as flammable and corrosive wastes.

Carter Color Coat took ownership of the property in 1990 before declaring bankruptcy two years later and leaving no liable party to foot the bill for cleanup. In December 2008, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found asbestos and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a suspected carcinogen, on the site. Federal officials subsequently removed large amounts of material from the property, but issues remain.

“In its current state, the site is an acute threat to human health and safety,” a state assessment reads. “The building has been declared ‘open and dangerous’ by the city of Detroit. Peeling lead-based paint and asbestos-containing debris may become airborne and pose a risk to human health through ingestion or inhalation.”

The neighborhood includes a few small businesses across the street and a residential area within a half-mile. In past years, Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality could have stepped in and spent the estimated $4.1 million to clean up the site with Part 201 money. But those days are gone.

“We’ve wound down most of our ongoing cleanup projects,” said Bob McCann, spokesman for Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment, the new agency formed in 2010 by the merger of the Natural Resources and Environmental Quality departments. “By the end of the year, we’ll have no cleanup program.”

With the city of Detroit in no position to take on a multimillion-dollar cleanup, the Carter Color Coat/Fisher plant sits idle.

Health

There was a time when residents along North 34th Street in Richland, northwest of Battle Creek, were essentially drinking chrome. In the late 1970s, their tap water contained hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen that had drifted into groundwater and residential wells from a nearby plastics plating company.

Kathy Owens and her husband arrived in the area 18 years ago, and at the time, Part 201 funds were being used to provide a safe water supply.

“When we moved here, they had drinking water delivered in gallon jugs to our porch,” she said. “There was a big storage tank out in the driveway that they trucked water in for and that was hooked up to the house system. So for the faucets and bathtubs and so forth, we used that.”

Within two years, the state had hooked Owens and other residents to the municipal water system.

Michigan has spent more than $10 million doing cleanup work at the site as well as a former dry cleaning operation nearby. Monitoring the situation to prevent problems could cost nearly as much.

In Richland and several other Michigan communities, officials have found that contaminated groundwater is on the move — inching closer to well fields, streams and lakes where it could cause major problems.

In Antrim County, a groundwater plume tainted with trichloroethylene has spread six miles from a former auto parts manufacturing plant in Mancelona to a residential/golf resort area. Contamination levels are 200 times greater than what is acceptable for human health.

Now, the plume is reaching the Cedar River and threatening the nearby well field that is one of two sources for the area’s drinking water.

Hooking up residences and businesses to municipal water lines and trying to remediate the Mancelona site has already cost the state $17.8 million. To continue monitoring the plume and conducting additional line extensions, state officials estimate it will cost $10 million more.

Chuck Edwards, of the Northwest Michigan Community Health Agency, has been tracking the plume. His work is paid for by Part 201.

“We’ll probably have to wait and see what we’ll do if (the state) drops the funding,” he said. “Will we have to notify the property owners in the area and let them know they’re on their own? We’ll have to see.”

In Richland, legal efforts to compel the plastics company to fix the problem eventually failed in the early 1990s when a judge decided the company could not afford the work, so the state stepped in. A contamination plume from the plastics plant stretched 1 3/4 miles off the site at one point. Through a groundwater pumping system paid for by Part 201, that plume has been reduced to a quarter-mile.

“The sad part is that if there isn’t a replacement funding source, we’ll have no choice,” said Mark DuCharme, a MDNRE senior environmental quality analyst. “We have to turn off the pumping wells. Our contractors, we can’t ask them to work for free. We would cease to control the plume, and it would likely increase in size again.”

Economic development

Two years ago, marketing downtown sites in Kalamazoo for redevelopment was hard enough for Jerome Kisscorni, head of the city’s economic development corporation. The pending end of Michigan’s Part 201 program is making at least one of his assignments next to impossible.

For just over a century, the site at 401 E. Alcott St. was home to paper-making operations. It’s now known as the Performance Paper property for one of its previous tenants. Major production activities came to a stop in 1997, but they left behind PCB contamination in the soil as well as Portage Creek, which runs through the property.

Despite efforts to remove contaminated material, including asbestos, from the site and help from the EPA, there is about $3 million worth of work left to be done — work state officials said they can no longer afford.

Kisscorni envisions a mixed-use development that encompasses the Performance Paper site and features a business park, natural areas and recreation fields — something to bring in property tax dollars and jobs. That project is now in limbo

“Right now, all I do is approve purchase orders for fences to keep people out,” he said.

The domino effect of this orphan site is easy to see. Houses sit boarded up. Nearly every street has several homes with bright orange foreclosure notices posted on the front door.

“Today, that neighborhood is probably one of the largest rental areas in the city,” said Steve Snyder, a RE/MAX real estate agent who handles properties in the area.

“It’s a neighborhood that’s kind of been stigmatized or has developed a reputation as a problem area because of that.

“And the values here have plummeted. Five years ago, the neighborhood’s average home sale price was probably in the $70,000 range. Today it’s probably in the $15,000 to $25,000 range. And $25,000 is probably pushing it.”

Much of that wow factor can be attributed directly to the look of the familiar fantastical characters on display, most notably Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter, a frizzy, carrot-topped concoction who takes on heroic sensibilities, and even moreso Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen, a bulbous-headed ferocity sporting a makeup job straight from Kabuki hell.

From “Edward Scissorhands” forward Burton has always proven himself a master of the garish, and here he exults in the story’s eye candy opportunities, as well he should.

Unfortunately, Burton has also let his affection for outrageous visuals get the best of his films (”Planet of the Apes,” “Sweeney Todd,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”) at times, forgetting to attach enough heart and soul to them.

But while it’s true “Alice” marches toward the same Big Battle conclusion as every other Narnia-Rings fantasy, the story’s over-riding sense of wonder and purpose gives it a sweetness Burton’s other recent films have lacked.

Selling that sense of wonder is the job of unknown Mia Wasikowska as a 19-year-old Alice who only remembers her first trip down the rabbit hole as a dream.

Burton constructs a nice frame that introduces Alice’s plight — some dork of a nobleman is proposing marriage, and she seems doomed to a life of dull normalcy at best.

But then she spots the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen) and follows him to his hole, which she promptly falls into, setting off a déjÀ vu of a story where she’s introduced to the kooky characters — the blue caterpillar (Alan Rickman), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas) — from her dream.

This, however, is not the same Wonderland of Alice’s youth. The tyrannical Red Queen, aided by her one-eyed right-hand man the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover, perfect), has thrown a blanket of fear over the land.

Luckily, legend has it that a brave warrior will soon arrive to help the White Queen (impossibly white Anne Hathaway) defeat her evil sister by slaughtering the monstrous Jabberwocky.

Unfortunately for Alice, she is that presumed warrior-savior; so the forces of evil are out to get her from the moment she arrives, and an alliance with the crazed Mad Hatter turns out to only add an extra dose of danger to her life.

Wasikowska, powdered white to distraction at times, plays Alice as something of a casually fierce angel, able to roll along with wild circumstance while instinctively righteous.

Depp is in full Depp bonkers glory as the Hatter, rattling on like a train off its track at times, but providing a surprising moral center. And Hathaway’s fluttery life-is-beauty hand motions as the White Queen are hilarious.

Still, the film’s most arresting image is the Red Queen. How Burton manages to balance that humongous head on that petite torso is the stuff of movie magic, and Bonham Carter’s sudden eruptions of fury are wonderful to behold.

Burton has uglied up Bonham Carter, his longtime partner in real life, in many a role over the years — a hag in “Sweeney Todd,” a gorilla in “Apes,” as the witch in “Big Fish” — but with the Red Queen they’ve both outdone themselves.

One area that might cause some disappointment for audiences, though, is the 3-D projection. The effects are perfectly adequate, but in a post-”Avatar” world, they still seem a bit lacking, added more as afterthoughts (which they likely were since the movie wasn’t actually shot in 3-D).

Still, “Alice in Wonderland” is an undeniable visual marvel and the best use of Burton’s eye in at least a decade. If its trajectory is a bit too familiar, its attitude, look and execution make up for it. This is indeed a “Wonderland” worth visiting.

“Once a moment is gone, it’s gone,” said his brother and caregiver, David Butler says in an interview to air on tonight’s “Campbell Brown”. “He can’t remember any good times, birthday parties, Christmas, any event.”

On October 7, 2006, Steven Butler, by his own admission, was drunk and disorderly. He refused an order from a police officer in his hometown to get off a city bus. The officer used his Taser ECD (officially, an “Electronic Control Device”) three times.

According to doctors, Butler suffered immediate cardiac arrest. He was revived by emergency medical technicians who happened to be close by, but his attorneys say his brain was deprived of oxygen for as long as 18 minutes. He is now permanently disabled.

Butler and his family have filed a lawsuit — not against the police, but against the maker of the weapon, Taser International.

John Burton, a lawyer based in Pasadena, California, says he can prove that when the weapons are fired directly over the chest, they can cause and have caused cardiac arrest. In addition, Burton says he can prove Taser knew about that danger.

“Well, we can prove that by early 2006,” said Burton, “but we suspect they had all the necessary data since 2005, since they were funding the study.”

The study Burton mentions was published in early 2006 by the American College of Cardiology Foundation. Funded by Taser, it focused on pigs struck by Tasers, with the conclusions, according to the study, “generalized to humans.”

The authors wrote that being hit by a Taser is unlikely to cause cardiac arrest, but nevertheless recommended Taser darts not be fired near the heart to “greatly reduce any concern for induction of ventricular arrhythmias.”

Dr. Douglas Zipes, a cardiologist based outside Indianapolis, Indiana, plans to testify against Taser in any lawsuit regarding what happened to Butler. In plain English, he says, that recommendation is a clear warning.

“I think Taser has been disingenuous and certainly up to 2006 — the case we are talking about — Taser said in their educational materials that there was no cardiac risk whatsoever,” Zipes said. “That Taser could not produce a heart problem, that there was no long lasting effect from Taser.”

Medical experts say that if a person is hit by a Taser dart near the chest, one result is a dramatic increase in the subject’s heartbeat — from a resting 72 beats a minute to as many as 220 beats a minute for a short period of time. In its court filings, the company says the “peak-loaded” voltage from a Taser at impact ranges up to 40,000 volts but it’s a 600-volt average for the duration of the firing.

In an e-mail, a spokesman for Taser said the company would not comment on any ongoing litigation. But in a court filing seeking to dismiss the Butler lawsuit, it said Taser devices “are repeatedly proven safe through testing, in human volunteers, in controlled, medically approved studies.” There’s no evidence, the company says, that being hit with a Taser causes cardiac arrest in humans.

But the company has significantly changed its recommendations for how Tasers should be used. Officers, it said, should no longer aim for the chest when using the device, instead targeting the arms, legs, buttocks.

Why the change?

A company document said “the answer has less to do with safety and more to do with effective risk management for law enforcement agencies.”

In other words, say lawyers who have sued Taser, it means police are less likely to be sued if they avoid hitting subjects in the chest. In court papers, Taser says the risk of cardiac arrest is “extremely rare and would be rounded to near zero,” but it adds: “However, law enforcement is left defending a lawsuit and disproving a negative, which is difficult to do.”

“Out of one side of their mouth, they publish this warning, saying, ‘Don’t hit people in the chest if you can avoid it,’” said Dana Scruggs, an attorney representing Steven Butler. “And on the other side, in the lawsuit and in their public statements, they deny that their device can affect the human heart.”

Nearly every big-city police department in the United States uses a Taser device. According to the company, more than 14,000 law enforcement agencies worldwide employ Tasers and more than 1.8 million people have had the weapon used on them since it was introduced into general law enforcement use in the 1990s. The human rights organization Amnesty International estimates more than 400 people have died as a result of Taser strikes.

Officially, it’s not a gun. As an electronic control device, Tasers are not classified as a firearm. The devices are regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

“There’s one thing that’s undeniable — that if I use my firearm, the chances are that you will suffer extreme injuries or death,” said George Gascon, the newly installed police chief in San Francisco, California. “The chances are much greater of reducing injuries with a Taser.”

San Francisco is one of three big-city police departments in the United States that don’t use Tasers (The others are Detroit, Michigan, and Memphis, Tennessee). Gascon wants to change that. He supports use of the device but says to call it “nonlethal” is inaccurate.

“We have referred to the Tasers for many years as a less-lethal weapon,” he said. “In the San Francisco experience, which we have to concentrate on, I have not said once that this is a nonlethal device because I believe it can be a contributing factor in causing death.”

Read: Chief’s Taser proposal rejected in San Francisco

Taser International is growing. Its latest earnings report says the firm made more than $100 million in profits last year by selling Tasers to both law enforcement and to individual consumers. And the company says even more police and sheriff’s departments are lining up to purchase the weapon every day.

The company argues in Steven Butler’s case that simply being in a stressful situation with police can bring on heart problems, and there’s no link between being being hit with a Taser and the cardiac arrest.

For Steven Butler, greeting the mailman now is a highlight of his day. He doesn’t dispute that he was drunk and disorderly when the officer tried to get him off the bus, but he and his family blame Taser for what happened to him. He says he’s not frustrated or angry, just resigned to spending the rest of his life trying to remember what happened.

The multimillion-dollar lawsuit is being filed by high-profile Southfield attorney Geoffrey Fieger on behalf of Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver of Clarksville, Tenn.

Fieger and Sarver claim the film’s screenwriter Mark Boal was embedded in Sarver’s unit, and the information he gathered was used in the film. The suit also names Kathryn Bigelow. Sarver says he is the main character.

The movie’s U.S. distributor, Summit Entertainment, says it “distributed the film based on a fictional screenplay” and hopes “for a quick resolution to the claims made by Master Sgt. Sarver.”

(CNN) — President Obama outlined his final version of a health care bill Wednesday and urged Congress to bring the plan to a conclusive vote within the next few weeks.

The president said his nearly $1 trillion proposal is a compromise plan that combines the best ideas of both Democrats and Republicans. He asked Congress to “finish its work” and end what has become a yearlong vitriolic legislative showdown over his top domestic priority.

“Everything there is to say about health care has been said, and just about everybody has said it,” he said. “Now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America’s families and America’s businesses.”

He also came out in support of a controversial legislative maneuver known as reconciliation, which would allow changes to the health care bill to be passed by the Senate with only 51 votes — a bare legislative majority.

The bill “deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote” that was used to pass President George W. Bush’s signature tax cuts and welfare reform in the 1990s, Obama said.

“At stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem, but our ability to solve any problem,” he said. “The American people want to know if it’s still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future. They are waiting for us to act.”

He said he doesn’t “know how this plays politically,” but knows that “it’s right.”

Top Republicans have repeatedly said Obama’s proposal amounts to a government takeover of the private health care system that will do little to control spiraling medical inflation. In recent weeks, they have reiterated their calls for the president to scrap his plan and start over. GOP leaders also fiercely oppose the use of reconciliation, saying it was never meant to be used for such a major policy change.

“I am disappointed that Democrats are moving ahead with the nuclear option,” said Michigan Rep. Dave Camp, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee.

“Big social policy changes should have bipartisan support and the support of the American people. This bill has neither. But as bad as the process for moving this bill is, the policy and its impact is far worse.”

Multiple Democratic sources have told CNN that the emerging consensus plan is for the House of Representatives to pass the Senate bill and send it to Obama. A package of changes that mirror the president’s plan would then be passed through both chambers under reconciliation rules.

Democrats increasingly brought up the prospect of using reconciliation after losing their 60-vote, filibuster-proof Senate majority in January, when GOP Sen. Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat previously held by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, a Democrat.

Observers note, however, that it remains unclear exactly which health care provisions can be approved under reconciliation, which is reserved for legislation pertaining to the budget.

If enacted, the president’s sweeping compromise plan would constitute the biggest expansion of federal health care guarantees since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid more than four decades ago. The White House says it would extend coverage to 31 million Americans.

Among other things, Obama’s plan would expand Medicare prescription drug coverage, increase federal subsidies to help people buy insurance and give the federal government new authority to block excessive rate increases by health insurance companies.

It increases the threshold — relative to the Senate bill passed in December — under which a tax on high-end health insurance plans would kick in.

The president’s proposal also includes significant reductions in Medicare spending, in part through changes in payments made under the Medicare Advantage program.

It does not, however, include a government-run public health insurance option — an idea strongly backed by liberal Democrats but fiercely opposed by Republicans and key Democratic moderates.

It also eliminates a deeply unpopular provision in the Senate bill worked in by Sen. Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, that exempts that state from paying increased Medicaid expenses.

Administration officials say Obama’s measure would cut the deficit by $100 billion over the next 10 years. They estimate the total cost of the bill to be $950 billion in the next decade.

Obama extended a final bipartisan olive branch to GOP leaders Tuesday, saying in a letter that he is willing to consider several of their ideas in a compromise plan. Among other things, the president said he is willing to commit $50 million to fund state initiatives designed to reduce medical malpractice costs. He backed undercover investigations of health care providers receiving Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs.

The president also backed Medicaid reimbursement increases to doctors in certain states, and supported language ensuring certain high-deductible health plans can be offered in the health exchange.

The president said his decision to consider the GOP ideas was a result of last week’s health care summit. GOP leaders, however, have said they are unsatisfied with Obama’s concessions.

“The only thing that will be bipartisan about this proposal will be the opposition to it,” promised Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky. “The American people are not for this.”

McConnell predicted that “every election in America this fall will be a referendum on this issue.”