Democratic congressional leaders said after meeting with President Obama on Tuesday that they were making progress on a health care compromise, despite a rough and tumble August recess that saw their proposal come under furious fire from critics.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev., and Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., emerged from a one-hour meeting with Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. proclaiming themselves “re-energized” and ready to press forward on the president’s top domestic priority.

But the difficulties they face were evident in their remarks. Pelosi reiterated that the House will not pass a health care bill — at least initially — unless it includes a public option among the plans to be made available to millions of individuals and small businesses. That is a core demand of liberals in her chamber.

Republicans in both chambers and many moderate-to-conservative Democrats oppose inclusion of such an option, and Reid was careful not to go beyond stating his personal support for the idea.

Instead, he again stressed Senate Democrats were “approaching this in the form of bipartisanship.”

“We still, after all these months, have a place at the table for the Republicans, and we’re going to do everything we can to work with them. We want a bipartisan bill,” Reid said.

“We do not want to do reconciliation unless we have no alternative,” he added, referring to a fast-track process that allows certain budget-related legislation to pass the Senate by a simple majority vote instead of the 60 votes needed to surmount filibusters under normal procedures.

Reid said he had not yet seen a draft compromise proposal offered by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus , D-Mont., who was sharing his plan Tuesday afternoon with the “Gang of Six,” a bipartisan negotiating group within his committee.

But Reid said he hoped Baucus’ panel could mark up a bill next week. Reid said the latest discussions among leaders and Finance members indicated they had narrowed their disagreements.

“Even before the August recess, 80 percent of health care is already done. It’s ... the 20 percent where we still had to work on,” Reid said. “In our conversations today, we think we’re up to 90 percent of things there are agreed upon. We have 10 percent that we need to work on, and we can do that.”

Pelosi said the timing of further action on health care legislation depends in part on the response to President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night.

“We’ve been on schedule, we continue on schedule. ... the speech tomorrow will be an important factor in the timetable,” Pelosi said.

The two leaders said Obama did not offer any dress rehearsal of his speech but they predicted it would, as Reid said, “put aside some of ridiculous falsehoods that have been perpetrated these past few weeks” by conservative critics of the House bill (HR 3200) and a version approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.