Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday told her caucus she would not let the House be forced into signing off on the Senate’s healthcare bill.

Pelosi spent two hours addressing her caucus via conference call on Thursday for the first time since she agreed to let the Senate bill serve as the vehicle for delivering a congressional health reform bill to the White House.

But Pelosi insisted from the onset that the House would not simply accept the Senate bill, despite the extremely fragile coalition that allowed a bill to emerge from the Senate.

“She answered questions about whether the White House wants just the Senate bill,” a senior Democratic aide said after the call. “The Speaker said that is not going to happen. We are going to negotiate a final bill.”

For the next two hours, Pelosi and other Democratic leaders fielded questions about the areas in which the Senate bill differs substantially from the healthcare bill Pelosi steered through the House in November.

From language that bars federal dollars from covering abortion procedures to how to raise taxes to fund health insurance expansion to the very mechanisms designed to make such insurance more accessible, the House and Senate bills present leaders with significant political and substantive gaps to bridge.

Pelosi took no policy stances beyond those she has made publicly, aides and sources on the call said. She declared earlier this week that a final bill must only meet her “AAA” affordability, accountability and accessibility test.

Instead, she and other House leaders used Thursday’s call to lay out all of the issues that must be addressed, and to let members air their concerns about Senate provisions that are gaining momentum, including a state-based public insurance exchange, rather than a national, government-run “public option” like the one written into the House bill.

A so-called “public option” is seen as having almost zero chance of surviving in Senate.

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I hope it does not come with hefty fines and imprisonment if one does not take insurance.