Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and GOP conference chair, tells National Review Online that he is unsure whether President Obama’s bipartisan health-care summit on February 25 will yield any meaningful results. “It is hard for me to see how you can take a bill that is fundamentally flawed and improve it without starting over,” he says.

Alexander also has little faith in the power of summits to mend serious policy differences. “If anything, I would have preferred that the focus was on jobs, debt, and terror,” he says. “While I’m not going to question the president’s motives, I question whether summits work. We had one on health care and one on entitlements last year, and they didn’t do much.”

Alexander says that regardless of his questions about the format, Republicans will be “very prepared” to debate. “We’ll do a lot of work ahead of time,” with the “hope of getting the president to accept some of our ideas to reduce costs and increase access.”

Who will be going from the GOP side? Alexander predicts that Republican leader Mitch McConnell will figure that out with White House aides later this week. A senior GOP Senate aide tells NRO that Republicans, as of Monday afternoon, still “don’t know who is invited, how many, or what the format will be — we just know that he plans to invite us.”