By NYCeve (Eve Gittelson)

As members of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives stand on the floors of each chamber debating the relative merits, and the extent and cost of healthcare the American people may or may not be entitled to, keep in mind, these people have healthcare and other benefits, the rest of us can only dream about.

Though we have fifty million Americans without any access to healthcare, and many additional millions dangerously underinsured, those we elect to do our business, have the finest and most affordable healthcare available in the United States. Why this fact is not part of the debate is beyond me.

Benefit consultant Watson Wyatt is forecasting a bitter 2010 open enrollment period for Americans not blessed to have the FEHBP.

In a word, higher costs, higher out-of-pocket costs, higher deductibles, more and greater costs shifted onto the shoulders of recession battered Americans.

This is what we have, and the healthcare reality for most Americans going forward.

What=2 0can U.S. workers expect when they receive their fall open enrollment benefit packages for 2010? In short, higher costs. But through research, global consulting firm Watson Wyatt has identified a few financial rewards trends in health benefits plans for next year.

Employees might find their 2010 employee benefit packages include financial rewards for promoting healthy lifestyles, full coverage for preventive services, closer scrutiny of dependent and spousal coverage, and greater use of consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs), according to benefit experts at Watson Wyatt.

“Faced with an uncertain economy and rising health care costs that show few signs of slowing, many employers have made changes to their health benefit plans for 2010,” said Tom Billet, a senior consultant with Watson Wyatt. “While next year’s benefits will reflect these higher costs, workers can also expect employers to continue their commitment to encourage employees to lead healthy lifestyles.”

Without a public option to act simply as a cost stabilizer and competitor to for-profit insurers, middle class families will continue to see huge chunks of their wealth fly out the window as healthcare costs continue the inexorable upward spiral.

On the other hand, our elected officials have what is known as the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan. It is heavily taxpayer subsidized, with the taxpayers picking up approximately 72% of the costs of th e premium.

For many years, the Cadillac benefits our elected officials avail themselves of, has been a huge issue for me and many Americans—but as I said, the national debate is strangely silent on this point.

When you receive a huge volume of emails from Americans in desperate need of healthcare as I do, you’ve got to wonder why the citizen taxpayers of our country agree to such an outlandish and unfair arrangement?

Kaiser Health News peels back the curtain on these deluxe benefits which as federal employees, members of the House and the Senate receive.

Children and dependents are covered.

“This is what keeps me alive,” says 13-year-old Toni Bethea, as she picks a tiny glass bottle off the kitchen counter of her home in Washington, D.C. The clear liquid inside is insulin. Toni has Type 1 diabetes.

“Your health is obviously not anything that you should play around with,” says Toni, a high-school freshman. She’s pretty, smiling and stylish — from her bangs angled across her forehead to her sparkly red fingernails.

“You should take it very seriously and when you have a chronic illness like what I have and other kids have, it’s very important that we take care of ourselves because there’s a lot of preventable stuff that can happen to us.”

FEHBP insures 8 million federal employees, retirees and dependents. This means that long after we have voted an elected official out of office, they=2 0hang onto these cherished benefits.

It helps that her mother, Rhonda Dorsey, has good insurance, which she gets as a federal employee. She’s covered by the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, or FEHBP. It insures 8 million federal workers, retirees and their families — and members of Congress. That federal health insurance program has been held up — by the President, lawmakers and other players in the health care debate — as a model of the kind of good insurance that should be available to all Americans.

Choice, choice and more choice.

Federal employees get a lot of choice. That’s what makes the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program stand out compared to other insurance. In the Washington, D.C. area, there are at least 16 health plans to choose from. Nationwide, according to a new report by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust, most companies offer only one health plan to their employees, and just one percent of companies offer three or more.

The federal Office of Personnel Management conducts annual negotiations with each health plan to set benefits and rates. That has allowed it to claim some success in constraining cost growth. But last year Blue Cross and Blue Shield — which covers about 60 percent of FEHBP enrollees — increased the premium for its standard option by 13 percent. As a result, the average for all federal plans went up207 percent. The year before, the annual premium increase was just 2.1 percent.

And what do the diabetic friends of Toni do?

Those kids who are either uninsured or dangerously underinsured. Toni learned this summer at a camp for diabetic children. They re-use their insulin needles—and dull needles really hurt.

Toni knows she’s fortunate. This summer, she went to a summer camp for kids with diabetes. And she saw what kids do when they don’t have good health insurance. “At camp they provide you with supplies, but I’ve seen kids who have saved their needles and taken them with them,” she says. “Even though you weren’t like supposed to, they would kind of sneak them just to make sure they would have something when they got back home.”

Toni and Rhonda know that when people don’t have good insurance, they’re so desperate they will even reuse a needle. “It gets dull. And so it really hurts. But you have to have insulin, just like I said,” Rhonda says. “I mean, without insulin, Toni would die. So you, take the pain in order to live.”

The French think the debate we’re having in the United States is “surreal”, they spend a fraction of what we do, and have a longer life expectancy.

France spent about $300 billion for the health needs of its 64 million people in 2007, the last year for which reliable statistics are available, the OECD reported. That amounted to about 11 percent of gross domestic product for a system covering an estimated 99 percent of the population, well below what Americans pay for a system that leaves out tens of millions of people.

On a per capita basis, France also ranked well below the United States in health expenditures. It was eighth on the OECD list, while the United States ranked at the top.

Spending less apparently has not lowered the quality of health care. Despite their reputation for guzzling red wine and eating fatty cheese, French people have for years enjoyed a longer life expectancy than their counterparts in the United States, currently at 80.98 years compared with 78.11.

The situation in America is no longer a crisis, it’s a catastrophe. How do the politicians sleep at night?