President Barack Obama breathed life into the flatlining health care reform debate on Feb. 7 when he proposed a bipartisan summit on health care to be held Feb. 25. The details are yet to be decided, but Obama called for a half day, live televised conference during an interview with CBS News’s Katie Couric.

Congressional Democrats welcome the summit as “reaffirming our commitment to seeking a bipartisan solution to health care reform,” according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). However, Republicans are not happy with the president’s statement that he does not intend to start from scratch with new legislation.

“If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected, Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate,” say House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in a February 8 letter to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

EBA’s health care reform panelists are skeptical about Obama’s approach as well. “I think free exchange of ideas and talking about the issues is a novel new political approach. I really hope it works,” says Andrew Butler, president of Iowa’s Butler Insurance Service, Inc. “The biggest challenge faced, though, is the line drawn in the sand by President Obama. Namely, he has no interest in starting over. It sounds like he plans on simply doing the same thing, the same way, hoping for different results. If he is truly trying to listen to the voters, he needs to restart the entire debate and listen. The process can then be handled incrementally and properly.”

Dave Lapka, president of logistics consulting company D360, calls the proposal “a setup.” “If the Republicans agree to meet, it needs to be with the very clear understanding that a start over collaborative approach will be attempted,” he says. “If not, there are 2,900 pages of Trojan horses that would all need to be identified and extracted, and missing any would create unnecessary cost and pain.”

As Director of the Shupe Center for Healthcare Reform, Bob Shupe believes the president and legislators have already strayed too far from finding a solution to rising health care costs. “The president and most everyone else would have us believe that much of the answer is simply lying at our feet, that we have already agreed on 80% of the suggestions, that if we can just be transparent and bipartisan, this will all be over and we can get on to fixing our ‘jobs’ situation,” he says. “There are answers, but many of those answers have to do with self-responsibility, less bureaucracy and a ratcheting down of both health care financing and delivery in tandem.”

The need for reform is “too important to do badly,” says Pat Carpenter, VP of business development for Sequent Retirement & Benefits Group. “If this get-together in front of the cameras is a serious discussion of incremental changes that will work, it would be bad theater but good for the country,” says Carpenter.  “If it is simply a few hours invested to dictate which current bill will be passed — House or Senate — it would be a colossal waste of resources.”

On the surface, it’s a good step forward, says Tom Schuetz, co-president of Iowa’s Group Services. However, he wants more details. “How would the Democrats treat any ideas that might come out of such a summit? Why not simply bring together the bipartisan committees that have worked on this issue for so long? Maybe it’s the pessimist in me, but this just seems like a political ploy to overcome past transgressions and secrecy with no real meaningful and defined purpose that such a meeting would bring to the debate,” he says. “I question whether the motive is to move the debate forward in a meaningful way.”