You can tell that the House of Representatives is having trouble rounding up the votes for a health care bill by this development – Steny Hoyer won’t commit to the President’s timeline for passage.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on Tuesday pushed back against the White House’s deadline for completing healthcare legislation.

“None of us has mentioned the 18th other than Mr. Gibbs,” Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday at his weekly meeting with reporters.

Going further, Hoyer refused to commit to House passage of either healthcare or the 2010 budget prior to the Easter recess, which is scheduled to begin on Saturday, March 27.

“Our objective is to pass both before the Easter break,” Hoyer said. “Is that going to be difficult? Yes. Is it a deadline? No.”

It’s simply doubtful Nancy Pelosi would bring anything to the floor that had the chance of defeat. And the whip count clearly shows a long path to get to victory.

(I will update the whip count near the end of the day, but Steve Kagen, along with John Spratt, may be undecided now. It’s very hard to judge the undecideds, who are making a negotiating position known as much as they are registering an opinion. But I completely disagree with Ezra Klein that there’s no value in counting votes. If this never comes up for a vote, people have a right to know where their representatives stood, who supported passage and who blocked it. And while a whip count is not 100% and always accurate, as a snapshot in time it does the job, fosters accountability and lets everyone know where people stand.)

House leaders do seem to be making movement on one key issue – avoiding a tough vote on the Senate provisions like the “Cornhusker kickback” and the excise tax. Under a plan floated by the House Rules Committee, lawmakers would write a “self-executing rule” to avoid a direct vote on the Senate bill.

Under this scenario, the Senate bill would be automatically attached to the reconciliation package, if the House passes reconciliation. In other words, Bill A would just become part of Bill B if the House passes Bill B, and the Senate could then vote on a reconciliation package before sending it to the president. This allows House members to approve the broader measure without actually voting on it.

The same aides who confirmed this process was under discussion quickly noted that party leaders have not yet arrived at a final decision, so it’s far from a done deal — a point House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) made repeatedly Tuesday during his weekly exchange with reporters.

This could also seemingly avoid the problem of the House having to go first, if the Senate wrote their reconciliation bill this way. But the House apparently must go first, at least in the eyes of the leadership. But one positive for House Democrats nervous of trusting the Senate to move forward with fixes: the self-executing rule could add a rider which says that the Senate bill cannot be signed into law without the reconciliation fixes attached. As this is one of the sticking points you see come up frequently among House Democrats, that could pave the way toward a bill.

But again, it’s all about the votes. And the Democrats don’t have them. Yet.