While President Obama has left the details on health care overhaul to the congressional committees charged with writing the bills, one top Senate Republican said Sunday it’s going to take “president leadership” to win bipartisan deals on paying for a plan, such as taxing employing benefits.

“We want to bring money from within health care, reshuffle it,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley , R-Iowa. “So we’re going to get money from the high-end health insurance policies and then we’re going to save hundreds of millions of dollars within Medicare that’s being wasted.

“... I think it’s going to take presidential leadership to get people of his party to see that we shouldn’t be subsidizing high-end health insurance policies that drive up inflation in health insurance, maybe, 1 or 2 percentage points of the seven or eight that it goes up every year,” Grassley said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Appearing on the same program, White House adviser David Axelrod said Obama isn’t going to make demands on what a final version should look like.

“One of the problems we’ve had in this town is that people draw lines in the sand and they stop talking to each other,” Axelrod said. “And you don’t get anything done. That’s not the way the president approaches [this].”

During the presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain , R-Ariz., suggested taxing benefits to pay for a revamp of health care and Obama expressed opposition to the idea.

“I’m asking, and I think the White House knows my view and the view of a lot of other Republicans,” said Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. “Since the president denigrated John Cain’s effort to move in this direction during the campaign, it’s going to take, in order to win over Republicans, presidential leadership in that direction.”

Grassley added that he and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus , D-Mont., are working on a bipartisan proposal with the goal of having it “overwhelmingly passed” in the Senate, “and that means bipartisanship, just not three or four Republicans going along with 58 Democrats, but a sizable number of Republicans.”

In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Obama has “put forward his version” of how to pay for health care overhaul, citing “about $660 billion over 10 years in savings from the current system in redirecting the money that’s not currently going to make people healthier and make them more secure would be on the table, as well as about $330 billion over 10 years in capping the itemized deduction.”

Obama thinks “that’s far preferable to the ideas currently being discussed about taxing employee benefits,” she said.

When asked whether Obama would sign a bill with that provision, Sebelius responded, “We don’t currently know what the Senate Finance Committee is going to propose, and I think there are certainly active discussions under way in the House and the Senate, and that’s good news. The bottom line is the president will not sign a bill that’s not paid for. The bill must be paid for and not add a dime to the deficit.”

“Well, it looks like they may try to pay for it, and frankly, they should, given the fact that we’re on a path now to double the national debt in five years and triple it in 10,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell , R-Ky., also appearing on the Fox program.

“But the real question,” he said, “is do you want to do something that is so comprehensive that requires this kind of cuts to Medicare and to seniors and to all of these tax increases when we could target the things that are askew in the system and fix them without this kind of massive overhaul?”