Today's health care summit is nothing more than political theater. Like an infomercial, it will pretend to be authentic, but it's actually contrived. Its purpose is to give President Obama a setting in which he can appear to rise above politics and partisanship to get things done for the American people. In fact, it is a device he is using to resurrect unnecessary, harmful legislation that the American people oppose and ram it through Congress.

The White House claims the summit is the culmination of "a year of historic national dialogue about [health care] reform," but it has really been an inside-the-Beltway monologue. Republicans were only invited to the discussion when Democrats began to notice how unpopular they were becoming with the electorate and understood the magnitude of the threat to their majority. Now at the last minute, the White House demands that Republicans present an alternative comprehensive plan when the two sides do not even agree on what needs to be fixed. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that Mr. Obama's proposal is too vague even to determine how much it would cost, which reinforces the idea that the summit is simply window dressing.