WASHINGTON When he jousts with congressional Republicans over health care policy during a televised meeting Thursday, President Barack Obama will seek to portray his adversaries as sharing many of the broad goals of his legislation and also strive to unify congressional Democrats to press ahead and adopt a bill, senior White House officials and leading Democrats say.

But Obama, top White House advisers and congressional leaders of both parties are under no illusion that the meeting will resolve more than a half-century of disagreements over health care policy. Instead, Democrats say, they hope the event will create a climate that helps revive their legislation in Congress and prove to the public that they are willing to hear out Republicans and even adopt their ideas.

"We may not be able to resolve all the disagreements, but we ought to be able to thrash out areas of broad agreement," said David Axelrod, Obama's senior adviser.

He added: "Sitting side by side working through these issues is better than not sitting side by side and dealing with distortions."

Republican leaders have not yet committed to attending the session and have said they doubt the sincerity of Obama's bipartisan overtures, given his refusal to discard the Democrats' legislation and start over.

But senior GOP aides said that party leaders planned to participate and that a chief goal would be to portray the president as defying the will of the people if he continues pushing for an expansive and expensive bill.

The meeting is fraught with risk, and also offers potential rewards, for each side.

White House officials said that by Monday they would unveil Obama's own comprehensive proposal, focused on uniting Democrats who spent much of the past year deeply divided on many points. Administration officials and congressional Democrats have expressed hopes that the meeting will help generate support for a plan to attach health care legislation to a budget bill, which would prevent a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

Obama and his fellow Democrats are also pursuing a parallel strategy: to use the televised event to put Republicans and their ideas on display. It is a gamble that Americans will actually watch an in-the-weeds discussion of health care policy and conclude either that Republicans are unwilling to negotiate or that their policy ideas - emphasizing tax incentives and state innovations - will not work.

Even as Republicans have denounced the meeting as "political theater," they, too, sense an opportunity.

Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican whip, said he believed Republicans ought to attend - not to negotiate with the president, but to use the session to make the case to the American people that the Democrats' bill ought to be thrown out.

"Republicans, I think, are up to the task of explaining why this bill is not for America," Cantor said. "We will be there to present a better way."

Before the policy debate, however, come the practical arrangements. White House officials and congressional Republicans are negotiating details of the meeting, including seating charts, who will speak and in what order, the number of staff members who can attend, and the positioning of TV cameras.

Obama, in his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday, urged congressional leaders to attend the meeting in good faith.

"I don't want to see this meeting turn into political theater, with each side simply reciting talking points and trying to score political points," he said. "Instead, I ask members of both parties to seek common ground in an effort to solve a problem that's been with us for generations."