From WNYNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Hey, did you watch the big health care summit?

More than a quarter of small businesses have reported a premium increase of 20% or more just last year.

On the Democratic side, President Barack Obama displayed virtuosic command of legal and technical arcana.

For the GOP, Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander affably voiced what came off as principled Republican desire to start health care reform afresh.

Could this extraordinary meeting deliver an oasis of comity and sanity in an ideologically riven Washington?

Of course not. As another Republican remarked, the whole spectacle was a setup, because in the

face of such carefully crafted presidential collegiality, the repetition of the standard GOP talking

points could only appear as intransigence or worse, as in this

exchange between the president and Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming medical doctor.

Would you be satisfied if every member of Congress just had catastrophic care, you'd

be better health care purchasers? I mean, you think, is that a change that we should make?

Yeah, I think actually we would. We'd really focus on it. You'd have more, as I say, skin

in the game. People would, and especially if they had a savings account, with health savings account,

they could put their money into that. And they'd be spending the money out of that.

Would you feel the same way if you were making $40,000? Yes, sir, Thursday's televised bipartisan health care summit was something else,

which is to say not a summit at all, but something else.

Political theater staged by the White House to juxtapose presidential rigor with GOP posturing on Fox, CNN, MSNBC,

and, of course, C-SPAN, performed to boost support for using the reconciliation process to pass health care reform?

Probably.

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