WASHINGTON — The Senate will not vote on health care legislation before leaving for its summer recess, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday as he acknowledged out loud the inescapable political reality that has been clear for several days.

President Obama brushed aside the delay on Thursday, burying his reaction 20 minutes into a speech he delivered in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, where he traveled to make his case for the urgent need to change the nation’s health care system.

“We just heard today that we may not be able to get the bill out of the Senate by the end of August or the beginning of August,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of more than 1,500 people gathered in a gymnasium. “That’s O.K. I just want people to keep on working. Just keep on working.”

Mr. Reid, speaking at a weekly news conference here, said he expected a bipartisan agreement on health care legislation to emerge from the Senate Finance Committee before the recess begins on Aug. 8 and that he would spend the break merging that bill with legislation approved by the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

The acknowledgement that the Senate would miss the deadline that President Obama had set months ago for completion of the health care legislation — and which came less than 24 hours after he went on national television to rally support for the initiative — was a stunning about-face for Mr. Reid, who had repeatedly insisted that the Senate would complete the bill before the recess.

With a far more forceful tone than the one he employed during his White House news conference on Wednesday night, Mr. Obama said the delay would not get in the way of signing a health care bill “by the end of this year.” He added, “I want it done by this fall.”

As he took questions from his audience in Ohio, the president was asked whether he intended to call on Democratic leaders in Congress to cancel their August recess to try to reach a compromise on health care. For now, he said, he had no plans to do so.

“My attitude is I want to get it right, but I also want to get it done promptly,” Mr. Obama said. “As long as I see folks working diligently and consistently, I am comfortable with moving a process forward that builds as much consensus as possible.”

He added, “I don’t want a delay just because of politics. I have to tell you that sometimes delays in Washington occur when people just don’t want to do anything that they think might be controversial. You know what? That’s not how America has made progress in the past.”

Mr. Obama’s return to Ohio, one of the states crucial to his election victory last fall, represented the latest step in an aggressive effort to make a stronger case for why the nation’s health care system needed drastic changes.

At Mr. Reid’s news conference on Thursday, he shrugged at a question about the timetable and told reporters that it should come as no surprise to anyone that the health care legislation would not be ready, though he also tried to put the blame for the delay on Republicans — saying they had asked for time.

“Working with the Republicans, one of the things that they asked for was to have more time,” Mr. Reid said. “A decision was made to give them more time for the Finance Committee.” He added: “I don’t think it’s unreasonable. This is a complex, difficult issue.”

Democrats themselves remain deeply divided over the health care legislation, in the Senate and in House, where members of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition have stalled work on the health care bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Mr. Reid’s remarks came after a contentious meeting earlier in the day among Democratic members of the Finance Committee. As the committee chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, nears a deal with Republicans on the panel, several Democrats have begun raising concerns that he is conceding too many points.

House Democrats voiced their own disagreements at a similarly heated caucus meeting, though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sought to play down the disagreements and said her own description of the meeting was to call it “invigorating.”

On both sides of the Capitol, Democratic leaders on Thursday faced a barrage of questions about whether they would lose momentum for the broad health system overhaul if they leave for the five-week break without approving a bill.

Ms. Pelosi held out hope that the House could vote on its measure, and even suggested that legislators would stay in Washington beyond their scheduled departure on July 31, if it was clear that the Senate was close to reaching agreement on its side. The Senate does not leave on its break for another week after that.

Although House leaders are still trying to address the concerns of the Blue Dogs, a main obstacle is disagreement over a proposed $544 billion income surtax on the highest earners to help pay the roughly $1 trillion, 10-year cost of the legislation.

The House Ways and Means Committee proposed the tax, and Mr. Obama at his news conference on Wednesday night said for the first time that he could support it. But rank-and-file Democrats are unlikely to agree to vote on such a broad-based tax increase without knowing if the Senate will include the provision in its bill.

So far, the Senate has expressed no interest in the idea. And some leading negotiators, including Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, have described it as a non-starter.

"If I see a proposal that is primarily funded through taxing middle-class families, I'm going to be opposed to that," Mr. Obama said in a prime-time news conference in the East Room of the White House. A surcharge on the highest-income Americans, under consideration in the House, "meets my principle," he said.

Mr. Obama used the news conference to take his message over the heads of lawmakers and straight to the public. Conceding that "folks are skeptical," he sought to convince Americans that overhauling the nation's health care system would benefit them and strengthen the economy.

"If somebody told you that there is a plan out there that is guaranteed to double your health-care costs over the next 10 years," he said, "that's guaranteed to result in more Americans losing their health care, and that is by far the biggest contributor to our federal deficit, I think most people would be opposed to that."

"That's what we have right now," he said. "So if we don't change, we can't expect a different result."

While Mr. Obama declared, "it's my job, I'm the president," he did not use the appearance at the White House to make any fresh demands on Congress.

Instead, he sounded cerebral as he delved into policy specifics for nearly an hour and tried to link them to the concerns of ordinary Americans.

As he sought to reassure the public that a new health care system would be an improvement, he also acknowledged that there would be changes that could be unsettling, a point that is often raised by critics.

"Can I guarantee that there are going to be no changes in the health-care delivery system? No," Mr. Obama said. "The whole point of this is to try to encourage changes that work for the American people and make them healthier."

Health legislation is Mr. Obama's highest legislative priority, and his success or failure could shape the rest of his presidency. But while he is under increasing pressure from leading Democrats to delve more deeply into the negotiations by taking positions on specific policy issues, he largely resisted doing so Wednesday night.

But the president did weigh in how the government might pay for the plan.

In addition to saying he would be open to taxing those households earning more than $1 million — a scaled-back version of an earlier proposal that would have imposed a surcharge on households earning $350,000 or more — he signaled that he was also receptive to another idea under consideration in the Senate: taxing employer-provided health benefits, as long as the tax did not fall on the middle class.

On Capitol Hill, Ms. Pelosi said Democrats remained on track to reach a deal on major health care legislation. But she acknowledged that the process had slowed in response to concerns among conservative Democrats about the cost of the bill, and that some House Democrats were reluctant to embrace the income surtax on high-earners without knowing whether the Senate would go along.

Indeed, even as Ms. Pelosi insisted that Congress was closer than ever to achieving a comprehensive overhaul of the nation's health care system, leaders of the Blue Dogs said a deal was still a long way off.

While Mr. Obama faces pressures from fellow Democrats, he is also fending off attacks from Republicans who sense an opportunity to knock him off his stride by arguing that the health care bill, estimated as costing more than $1 trillion over the next decade, will not slow or reduce the growth of health spending.

The White House has been in a running debate this week with Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, who predicted that health legislation would prove to be Mr. Obama's "Waterloo moment." To that, Mr. Obama said: "This isn't about me. I have great health insurance, and so does every member of Congress."

In his opening remarks Wednesday night, Mr. Obama said he was aware that many Americans are asking, "What's in this for me?" But he also tried to appeal to the nation's conscience, casting the issue as a matter of urgency to families who are losing their life savings trying to pay for medical care and to businesses burdened by trying to provide coverage to their employees.

But there is another reason Mr. Obama is rushed: He knows the more Congress delays passage of a health bill, the more time his Republican opponents will have to marshal their opposition and kill it.

"If you don't set deadlines in this town, things don't happen," Mr. Obama said. "The default position is inertia."

Robert Pear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.