Richard Anthony for Congress

Today, President Obama is meeting with Congressional leaders for a bipartisan discussion of health care reform. As someone who cares deeply about health care in this country, and as a progressive Democrat running for office in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, I have many thoughts on this subject. Here are just a few.

From the beginning, I would have liked to see Congress pass Universal Health Care preferably through a single payer system. Unfortunately, given the fiscal and political environment in which we find ourselves, there is no chance of passage for that kind of legislation. As a compromise, I strongly support health care reform with a robust public option. The main thing is not to stall or delay real reform at a time when health insurance companies are jacking up rates on Americans who are already struggling with high unemployment and a lousy economy.

To highlight this point, I just read a news story this morning that Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield is raising rates in Virginia – in some cases by more than a third! As the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star reports, these increases “are similar to the ones that President Obama and others criticized when WellPoint, Anthem's parent company, imposed them this month in California.”

This situation obviously is not acceptable. As President Obama has pointed out many times, these rates of increase in health care costs are unsustainable, both for individual Americans as well as for the country as a whole. Which brings us to the man I want to replace in Congress, Rep. Frank Wolf. The fact is, Wolf is a big part of the problem, not the solution. Wolf talks about setting up a budget commission to reduce our deficits, yet he has voted repeatedly against changes to the health care system in order to “bend the cost curve down.” The end result is that those deficits will explode out of control, taking our country’s fiscal health with it.

Unfortunately, the hypocrisy of Frank Wolf and his fellow Republicans knows no bounds. That’s why I pointed out the other day that Wolf was for an independent budget commission to tackle the nation’s long-term fiscal problems until President Obama said he supported it, at which point Wolf was against it. These are the kinds of partisan political games we don’t need anymore in Washington.

The bottom line is this. We all know this is an urgent situation. We all know something must be done to reform our broken health care system. But we also know that, for many years now – and certainly over the past year - Republicans have been nothing more than the “Party of No” on health care reform. This, despite the fact that Democratic health care reform already includes many Republican ideas: the “individual mandate;” letting families and business buy health insurance across state lines; allowing individuals, small businesses, and trade associations to pool together and acquire health insurance at lower prices; allowing states “to create their own innovative reforms that lower health care costs;” making states eligible to receive grants to develop, implement and evaluate innovative medical malpractice reforms. Yet all Republicans have to say for themselves is, “no, no, and no!”

Hopefully, today’s health care summit will lead to a change in the attitudes of Frank Wolf, Eric Cantor, John Boehner and others. But honestly, I’m not holding my breath. The sad fact is, Republicans have spent the past year obstructing progress, talking about how they want health care reform to be President Obama’s “Waterloo” and how they want him to “fail,” while Americans suffered under our current health care delivery system.

That’s why it’s now time to cut to the chase. Since Republicans have no intention of being constructive on this issue, unless of course you consider “tear it up and start all over again” to be constructive, it’s time for Democrats – the people we worked so hard to elect in 2006 and 2008 – to use their overwhelming majorities in Congress to get this job done. It’s time for Democrats, and that includes Senators Warner and Webb, to strongly support the use of reconciliation to pass health care reform with affordability, portability, a robust public option, competition in the industry, and mechanisms to keep insurance companies honest. Republicans can claim all they want that reconciliation is not the right way to go, but as usual they are being hypocritical, as they themselves used reconciliation to “jam through” George W. Bush’s agenda back in the early 2000s. Now is not the time to surrender when we are on the brink of victory. Now is the time to lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.