As the final details of the health care bill are negotiated in secret meetings this week, people across the country are taking a step back to consider the evolution of such a bloated piece of legislation. It occurs to some that we don’t really know how Congress plans to lower our health care costs, one of the supposed reasons for this massive bill.

The New York Times this morning ran an article about Coloradans’ concerns – they were once enthusiastic about reforming the high costs and bureaucratic problems within the system, but are now feeling betrayed.

If anything is clear across the ideological spectrum, it’s that Colorado is fed up with the games being played in Washington. Tamara L. Kirch, who is uninsured, bristled at the proposed requirement to buy insurance. “We have a frontier mentality,” Ms. Kirch said. “I don’t want the government telling me what to do.”

The irony of keeping health care costs down by passing an enormous spending spree is not lost on many residents. Donny Seyfer of Fort Collins put it this way: “I am an automotive diagnostician,” Mr. Seyfer said. “We look for the root cause of problems. If we treat the symptoms, the problem always comes back. With health care, we are not treating the root cause: Why does it cost so much?”

These are exactly the attitudes Americans for Prosperity’s Colorado state director, Jeff Crank, has seen over the last few months. As the anger has grown, more and more citizens have been turning out on the streets and calling upon their senators and representatives to listen.

“We are at the point where both senators only invite people in favor of their views to meetings on health care,” Crank says. “At the beginning, Coloradans were hopeful and interested in bipartisan solutions such as tort reform. But now, the senators have made clear that they are only interested in supporting an ideology … they are not listening and the average citizen sees that.”