This is an open letter to those who support the health care bill being pushed through Congress.

I will honor the assumption of many supporters that they are intelligent and compassionate. Being so endowed, the question is this: Why would you support legislation that is being presented to the American people with a series of lies, misrepresentations and purposeful omissions?

The question is especially important because this bill will cost trillions of dollars and influence at a very personal level the lives of every American.

Please drop the "I did it because you did it first" rhetoric. Just because politicians lie and President George W. Bush and President Bill Clinton allegedly lied on a regular basis, does not minimize the relevance of my question.

Conservatives, progressives and liberals are entirely united in the belief that government-controlled health care is a fundamental issue that goes to the core of what type of people we are and who we hope to be. It is an issue too important to tolerate the usual political game-playing.

So why then are we seeing political gamesmanship, and on a level of deceptiveness seldom witnessed even in recent American history? Further, what does this tell us about honest efforts to improve the wellbeing of our family, friends and neighbors?

The health bill was delivered to important committees in the middle of the night, and politicians were urged to pass it immediately.

President Barack Obama stated, "So let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait." Last week he emphasized that Congress needed to "seize the opportunity." Yet this week he admitted that he was not familiar with parts of the bill.

Everyone wants good health care. A good plan does not need a short window of "opportunity" to show its merits. People would recognize a good plan in the light of day.

Suddenly, it is an emergency that a number of Americans are uninsured.

Yet, we are not told how many don't need or want insurance, or that about 10 million of the uninsured are not even American citizens.

The bill requires you to have health care. If you refuse, you can have 2.5 percent of your income confiscated by the government.

All employers must provide insurance or pay a penalty of 8 percent of payroll.

Businesses do not pay taxes and penalties. They simply raise the money from their customers, lower salaries or fire employees.

We are told that the program will cost $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

Even Congress's own budget office proclaims this figure to be fantasy.

It will cost a lot more.

In 1965, the government estimated the cost of Medicare Part A in 1990 to be $9 billion. The actual figure was $67 billion. The Bush Medicare prescription was sold to the American taxpayers at a cost of $400 billion. Immediately after it was signed, we were told the cost would be $534 billion.

Our own past and the experience of other countries with socialized medicine tell us that the true cost will be more like $10 trillion.

We don't have the money. We are told that funding will come from the rich and from reduced federal spending. That will not happen, and every serious person knows it.

The federal deficit is dramatically higher than at any time in history.

Current spending and proposed bills will increase the deficit again next year. We are already perilously close to a currency collapse, the effects of which would make lack of health insurance trivial by comparison.

To survive, our economy has to expand at a rapid rate while walking a tightrope between monetary collapse on one side and runaway inflation on the other. This health care bill would make the probability of executing this almost nil.

Our government is telling us that we cannot allow reason and reality to interfere with passage of the health bill. This should inform us, both conservatives and liberals, that we should insist that this bill die as soon as possible.