Top House Republicans pressed President Barack Obama Wednesday for more leadership and a detailed plan on budget cuts, with one leading lawmaker accusing him of distorting a Republican health care proposal at the center of the divide with Democrats over spending.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said the meeting was productive despite the absence of any signs of progress. He also made clear that Obama has no intention of letting up on his assertions that Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to send future government health care recipients into the private insurance marketplace will transform Medicare. Medicare is the government health care program for the elderly.

"He doesn't believe that we need to end Medicare as we know it," Carney said at a White House briefing, about an hour after the meeting between Obama and House Republicans.

The White House session came as the Republicans sought to build pressure on Obama for trillions in spending cuts in exchange for any increase in the government's ability to borrow.

Afterward, dozens of rank-and-file Republican lawmakers streamed out of the the White House and into a caravan of blue buses waiting for them, while members of the Republican leadership stopped on the driveway to speak to reporters and camera crews awaiting them in under a steaming sun.

It was hard to see any concrete progress from a meeting that, based on descriptions by both sides, amounted to a face-to-face recitation of each side's positions, but no breakthrough on how to reach a debt-reduction deal. The talks came as an Aug. 2 deadline approaches for the federal government to raise the debt limit or go into unprecedented default.

According to a Republican official briefed on the meeting, Republican leaders told Obama that he had not put a specific plan for spending cuts on the table. They brought up a speech he gave in April in which he called for deficit reduction totaling $4 trillion through spending cuts, tax increases and other measures. The Republicans said a speech isn't a plan.

Ryan, who heads the House Budget Committee, had attended the speech only to hear Obama excoriate his Medicare proposal. On Wednesday the congressman told the president he had viewed that as a sign that Obama was thinking about the November 2012 elections and wanted fellow Democrats to turn up the political heat, according to the Republican official.

Obama is running for a second four-year term in the elections and cutting government spending and reducing the spiraling U.S. debt are expected to be major issues in the campaign.

Ryan said he explained his Medicare plan to the president to get him to stop mischaracterizing it. Obama and Democrats routinely label Ryan's proposal a "voucher" plan that would undo Medicare.

"It's been misdescribed by the president and many others and so we simply described to him precisely what it is we've been proposing so that he hears from us how our proposal works so that in the future he won't mischaracterize it," Ryan said.

Vice President Joe Biden is leading talks on reaching spending cuts alongside the measure raising the debt ceiling in advance of the Aug. 2 deadline set by the Treasury Department.

If no action is taken by then, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has warned, the government could default on its obligations and risk turmoil that might plunge the nation into another recession or even an economic depression.

The government already has reached the limit of its borrowing authority, $14.3 trillion, and the Treasury is using a series of extraordinary maneuvers to meet financial obligations.

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Associated Press writers Ben Feller and Erica Werner contributed to this report.