According to senior lawmakers and aides familiar with the legislation, it will not dictate what the plan can pay hospitals, doctors and other providers, a goal that many liberal Democrats had hoped for as a means to control costs. 'People are coming to realize it's going to be very tough to get to that point,' said House Education and Labor Committee chairman George Miller, D-Calif., a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Instead, much as commercial insurers do now, the federal government under the House plan would have to negotiate rates with providers, a concession that Pelosi and her lieutenants are making to conservative Democrats wary of the public option. Pelosi's decision to endorse the compromise ends weeks of heated debate between liberal and conservative Democrats. It also comes just days after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., threw his weight behind a slightly different compromise that would give states the ability to opt out of a national government insurance plan. Reid is now working to convince conservative Democrats to back his proposal, which also would require the plan to negotiate with providers, so he could overcome a planned Republican filibuster. Senate Democratic leaders believe they are just a few votes shy of the 60 they need. But with other parts of the bill still being developed, it appears increasingly unlikely that Reid will be able to move a bill through the Senate before Thanksgiving. The House bill -- which Democrats are still struggling to keep under $900 billion over the next decade -- builds on legislation that House Democrats introduced earlier this year. It will include new regulation of the insurance industry, prohibiting insurers from denying coverage to sick people. And it will provide subsidies to millions of Americans -- although not all -- to help them buy insurance in a new regulated insurance market, or exchange, in which commercial insurers would offer plans alongside the government. It will also require Americans to buy insurance and mandate that large employers provide workers with health benefits. All Americans making less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level -- or $16,245 for an individual and $33,075 for a family of four -- would be eligible for Medicaid, the joint federal-state insurance program for the poor. Earlier versions of the legislation had limited eligibility for Medicaid, which now primarily serves poor children and their families in many states, to people making less than 133 percent of the federal level. The bill will be largely funded by Medicare cuts -- many of them designed to make the program more efficient -- and a new 5.4 percent surtax on individual taxpayers making more than $500,000 and couples making more than $1 million. And after 10 years, it will boost coverage by around 35 million people, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That is substantially more than the bill approved by the Senate Finance Committee this month, which would have dropped the number of uninsured by 29 million. (Begin optional trim) The bill also will include a complex mechanism for limiting the use of taxpayer subsidies for abortion that would require insurance companies that offer abortion coverage to segregate funds received from consumers from subsidies provided by the federal government. That provision has come under fire from many lawmakers opposed to abortion rights, and Democratic leaders continue to work on ways to resolve the issue, according to one senior Democratic aide. (End optional trim) Pelosi and other liberal lawmakers had worked for weeks to rally support for a so-called 'robust' public option, which would pay providers 5 percent more than Medicare, the federal insurance program for the elderly. Such a plan promised to save the government tens of billions of dollars over the next decade, in part because Medicare typically pays providers less than commercial insurers pay. But that stoked opposition from hospitals, which are important employers in many rural areas represented by conservative Democrats. Even in defeat, several leading liberals lawmakers noted Wednesday how much the prospects for a public option had improved since last summer, when many political analysts left it for dead. And Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., a leader of the influential House Progressive Caucus, refused to throw in the towel. 'It's not even the fourth quarter,' she said. 'We will be insisting on it being as strong as it possibly can be.' Woolsey and other liberal congressional leaders are scheduled to meet with President Barack Obama on Thursday. 'He needs to hear from us that he needs to support the public option,' she said. 'He's not saying it loud enough. We want to make sure he lets the Senate know he wants a public option in the bill.' 