Immediately after President Barack Obama announced a bipartisan health reform summit, Democrats and Republicans made clear they have almost no expectation the half-day meeting can break a bitter yearlong standoff.

The two parties are staking out positions that leave them completely at odds even before they sit down.

Republicans say they’re open to compromise — as long as Obama tears up the House and Senate bills, restarts the legislative process and drops several key parts of his wish list.

Democrats say, not a chance.

And in fact, Obama hopes to walk into the Feb. 25 summit with an agreement in hand between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on a final Democratic bill, so they can move ahead with a reform package after the sit-down.

House Republican leaders delivered a letter to the White House Monday that included a list of pointed questions that they would like answered before the meeting at Blair House, such as whether Obama would give up on using reconciliation, a way to pass health reform in the Senate with just 51 votes.

“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,” the letter read.

So what’s the point? A jaded Washington wondered how a single meeting — in front of live TV cameras, no less — could change the fundamentals of the debate.

Many concluded it won’t.

“Good luck with that,” said New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, playing the role of Democratic skeptic to the president’s proposal. “The GOP has been the ‘party of no’ all year. Republicans have made a tactical decision not to cooperate, and they’ve even called health care reform Obama’s Waterloo.”

Republicans and Democrats said it was too soon to lay out their plans for the meeting. But already, their respective strategies seemed to be taking shape, with both sides gearing up to use the summit as yet another forum for political point-scoring.

For Obama, it fits neatly into his post-Massachusetts strategy of painting the GOP as do-nothing obstructionists. The Republicans have spent the year almost uniformly opposing Obama’s agenda — and being rewarded by voters for doing it.

Now Obama wants to use the meeting to call them out in public, to question whether they have any plans to fix the nation’s health care system and any willingness to help him do it. The White House is eager to draw a sharper contrast with Republicans in the months leading up to the 2010 election, and clearly sees the meeting as a good start.