Every year around the holidays, many of us spend time thinking about what truly matters in our lives. For a lot of people in my home state of South Dakota, and around the country, that includes the peace of mind that comes with knowing they will be able to get good health care when they need it. There is much we in Congress can do to help bring about a health care system that provides that peace of mind and works for the American people.

That means reform that moves us forward by truly lowering costs for families and small businesses, helping the uninsured, and not adding to the deficit. But under the bill Democrats are trying to push through the Senate, 90 percent of Americans who buy insurance in the private market will get no real relief from skyrocketing premiums, and in some cases will end up paying even more. That's not moving forward, it's moving in reverse.

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the Democrats' plan will leave Americans struggling under the same hefty premium increases they have been paying for years - premiums that will continue to increase at double the rate of inflation.

The way things stand now, if you get health insurance through work, as 83 percent of all privately-insured Americans do, your premiums are expected to go up by about five and a half percent each year through 2016. That's too much, but it's virtually the same pace they would be expected to go up under the Democrats' bill.

Premiums for a typical family in that situation run close to $14,000 a year now, with employers paying the lion's share. That number will jump to about $20,000 a year by 2016 under the Democrats' so-called reform plan.

It gets worse if you're self-employed and buy insurance on the individual market. If you're in that group, your rates are currently expected to go up by about five and a half percent a year. But under the Democrats' plan, you can expect to see your rates increase even more, by nearly eight percent per year.

American families are facing more than just higher insurance premiums. The Democrats' plan comes with a price tag of $2.5 trillion in its first 10 years of full implementation. And with this $2.5 trillion price tag, your premiums will keep going up just as much as they do now.

The Democrats propose to pay for that, in part, with almost $500 billion in cuts to Medicare and another $500 billion in higher taxes. Some of that cost will be paid directly by taxpayers, and some will be passed on to them because of new fees on drug companies and medical equipment makers. But there also will be the increased costs the bill levies on employers. Those new costs, combined with their share of the higher insurance premiums, will mean smaller paychecks for those who have a job, and fewer jobs created for the millions of unemployed.

At a time when we are struggling with a 10 percent unemployment rate, Democrats are pushing a health care bill that will harm the small businesses we are counting on to create the jobs in the first place. The National Federation of Independent Business, the nation's leading small business association, recently concluded that in one way after another the Democrats' bill "fails small business."

There are approaches that can make our health care system better, cheaper and more efficient; and Republicans have offered a number of solutions that would provide needed relief. But the current bill under consideration in the Senate simply costs too much, and provides no real reform to lower costs.

The American people understand that, and an ever-widening majority of them oppose the Democrats' bill. The people are right to demand that we start over and give them the real reform they deserve.