One of the most often cited reasons for passing health care reform is the problem of costs - health insurance costs and health care costs.

Everyday, many Americans face difficult decisions about whether to continue to pay for health insurance when their premiums are increasing or how to pay for health care - sometimes a life-saving intervention - that isn’t covered.

With costs skyrocketing, it can be too much to bear for the family budget. This is the number one complaint I hear from Kansans, and for me, the number one reason I believe we must reform health care in America.

However, for those that think this bill is the answer, I warn them to look much more closely at the fine print. The problems are far deeper than the $940 billion price tag that will still leave 23 million people uninsured; the tax hikes; the Medicare cuts and the mandates.

The biggest problem is that health care costs will actually increase for many Kansans under this so-called reform. Here’s why:

While it’s true that your insurance company will not be able to drop you should your treatment become expensive or refuse to cover your pre-existing health condition, these mandates on insurers are not paired with any meaningful way to ensure that people continue to buy insurance when they are still healthy.

This means that the young and healthy people who keep premiums low by subsidizing those in the risk pool who are already sick, have no incentive to buy insurance until they themselves get sick. When the insurer is forced to pay out more and more claims without having this young and healthy population to keep costs down, premiums for the sick will rise at an even higher rate than they already have.

In addition, your premiums will rise even higher as hundreds of billions of dollars of new taxes on health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device companies get passed on to you, the consumer.

Likewise, this bill adds 16 million new people to Medicaid and cuts half a trillion dollars from Medicare. We already know that Medicaid and Medicare severely underpay providers like doctors and hospitals, resulting in an annual “hidden tax” of nearly $90 billion per year on those who purchase private insurance. Expanding Medicaid and cutting Medicare will only increase this hidden tax, raising premiums even higher.

Moreover, this bill will greatly expand the federal government’s control over what your insurance company covers. For example the bill empowers the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the very body that recently reversed its long-standing recommendation that women get mammograms to check for breast cancer at age 40, to decide which tests and treatments get covered by private insurers under federal law. Cost will be the factor, not medical need.

This huge increase in government control will also have the tragic unintended consequence of leaving the next generation of life-saving drugs undiscovered. As the government refuses expensive new treatments, pharmaceutical and biotech companies that do the cutting-edge research won’t have the money to invest in better cures.

I want to leave you with one last story that makes me wonder if the congressional supporters of this bill even really understand what’s in it. At President Obama’s bipartisan health care summit last month, Representative Louise Slaughter told a sad story about a woman being forced to wear her dead sister’s dentures because she could not afford her own. This story was used to create an emotional response in support for health care reform, but there’s just one problem. This bill doesn’t actually cover dentures or dental care. In other words, it would not help this woman at all.

Leaders on Capitol Hill know that this bill doesn’t have the support of the public, based on a variety of opinion polls. Nevertheless, they are determined to ram it through. In the House, leaders are so desperate to enact the bill that they want to avoid asking the members to vote on the unpopular health care reform that will reform one-sixth of our entire economy. Instead, they are preparing to substitute another bill for the vote and “deem” health care passed as a part of it. That has never been done for such a major piece of legislation, and many scholars believe it is unconstitutional.

I urge the House and Senate leaders to stop this insanity. It’s too important not to get it right.