At Nassau Medical Center few watch summit

Olympic curling was showing on one flat-screen TV. A soap opera was playing on another. But most of the televisions in public places at Nassau University Medical Center were tuned to stations offering weather reports.

Which made the scene at NUMC - from the main lobby to patient waiting areas - a microcosm of a region more concerned about weather yesterday than the future of health care reform.

President Barack Obama's unprecedented health care summit was supposed to help drum up support from the public.

But it wasn't working too well at NUMC in East Meadow, where a significant portion of patients are underinsured, or have no insurance at all.

By not watching, they didn't miss much. Just more partisan bickering that masqueraded as a policy debate.

"I've sat here and watched the Democrats and Republicans go at it and the president try to make nicey-nice," said George Maggio, who waited with his wife, Carol, for an appointment in the hypertension, diabetes and vascular disease unit.

"The problem today is that if Democrats say yes, Republicans say no and if Republicans say yes, Democrats say no," he said. "They've lost touch with the rest of us."

In one lobby, patient Alan Pepenella sat sorting through a pile of paper as the screen above his shoulder showed Obama and Republicans covering stale ground in the partisan fight over reform.

"I haven't been watching," Pepenella said. "I've just been waiting." But, he was quick to add, "Good health care is important."

Nearby, Ducarmel Axis, who was on a lunch break from the hospital's medical records department, wasn't watching either.

"I'll TiVo it later," he said. "I'm trying to understand it and I think that something has to be done because reform is important to patients at this hospital, where so many cannot afford to pay for their care."

In the employee cafeteria, one television was set, for a time, on Fox, which also was broadcasting the summit. But the TV was dark by the time Phillip Sepulveda, who works in anesthesia, took his break. He sat near a second television, which was broadcasting a weather report.

"What I want to know is how are we going to pay for it," said Sepulveda, who said Obama and Congress should go back to considering a public option.

Of the president, he said, "He has to make something happen."

Dr. Glen Faust, chairman of the hospital's surgery department, said he knows what successful health care reform would look like.

"It would look like this unit," he said, "where I treat patients who self-pay, who have insurance and who have no insurance and I don't have to know who is who."

Thursday's summit probably won't get the nation any closer to that kind of real reform.

In fact, it surely would have been better to hold the forum at a place like NUMC, talking to Dr. Faust and his patients instead of trying to outmaneuver each other before the TV cameras. When it was over, not one single member of Congress seemed any more willing to compromise.

Nothing in this unprecedented summit signaled any real change or progress in the debate. In the end, it looked and sounded more like a bad rerun.