What's the minority party thinking, now that it's gone from 80 votes down in the House and a 40-60 split in the Senate to 80 votes down in the House and a 41-59 split in the Senate? I abandoned the warmth of my home office this morning to find out.

Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the ranking member in the House Ways and Means Committee, told a Health Affairs forum at the National Press Club that as far as the Democratic health care reform bill is concerned, "the bill is dead, and it should be."

His idea of reform? Allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines; limiting medical malpractice awards ("enough to pay for reform," he said); creating high-deductible, high-co-pay plans for the uninsured ("we're not trying to get to universal coverage"); and setting up special pools to make insurance more affordable for small business. If that sounds familiar, it should because it is essentially the same plan that was offered by Sen. John McCain and rejected by voters just 14 months ago.

He lambasted the subsidies in the House and Senate bills that would help the uninsured buy coverage, calling them a trillion-dollar tax increase and a federal takeover of health care. He called the Congressional Budget Office estimate that showed the bill would pay for itself as "a white paper floating around."

He castigated Democrats for covering over half the uninsured through Medicaid. "That's not health care reform, that's entitlement expansion," he said. He then lauded the the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit passed by a Republican-led Congress (without raising taxes to pay for it) as the kind of incremental reforms he would like to see.

There were a few areas that have slammed already-insured middle class voters where he could find common grounds with Democrats. He called for national regulations prohibiting insurance companies from denying people coverage because of pre-existing conditions or setting annual or lifetime caps on coverage. "The people seem to want that," he said.

But when I asked him if his embrace of national health insurance regulation in those areas would extend to creating community-wide pools that provide similar rates for all employers no matter what the underlying health status of their employees and their families (so-called community rating), he replied, "I'm not a fan of that. I don't want to see a national insurance commissioner."

In other words, if President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership had an inkling to reengage the leadership of the Republican Party, there wasn't much evidence on display to suggest anyone on the other side would be offering a receptive ear.

New York Times columnist David Brooks attended the session. He prefaced his question by commenting that the common ground between the two parties appeared to be more like "common pebbles."

More like common grains of sand, I'd say.