There was hope in America that after last week's health care summit, the partisan walls would crack and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle would hash out a reform package together — one that maybe encompassed the best ideas from the Democratic and Republican plans.

That hope is looking less and less likely to come true.

News reports across the country have reported over the last 24 hours that Senate Democrats are readying to push ahead with their pre-summit health reform plan — leaving Republicans and likely a majority of Americans in the rear-view mirror.

It was assumed passage of the Democratic package was virtually impossible after Republican Scott Brown won the Senate election in Massachusetts, breaking the Democrats' filibuster-proof majority.

But party leaders are urging the Senate to bypass the traditional 60-vote rule for moving a bill forward and instead fall back on a procedure called reconciliation, which allows a bill to proceed on a bare majority and is almost always used to resolve budget disputes and not to enact major policy.

If it seems like the Democrats are bending the Senate rules — well, they are. Of course, this is nothing new — the Republicans in Congress used the same loophole to pass the President Bush tax cuts when the GOP was in control.

Still, it doesn't make the procedure right. Tossing out the rules to adopt a one-party health care bill will cause a volatile issue to explode.

Right now, polls are showing that at least half of Americans oppose the Democratic version of health care reform, with barely 40 percent supporting it. If the public is that deeply divided, how can Democrats bully through such a proposal?

It's not certain there is enough Democratic votes left in the House to pass the proposed bill — even if the Senate uses reconciliation to hand it over. Many House Democrats fear a public backlash this fall. But if Senate and House Democrats do strong-arm passage of the bill, what should Americans think? This is too vital an issue to pass by bending the rules — and too vital for a divided public to stand by and watch it happen.

Health care reform may or may not be dead, depending on which talking head is speaking. But for the first time since President Obama took office, Democrats and Republicans had a substantive debate on a very divisive topic.

Can we dare dream that such bipartisan take can become a regular occurrence?