As the Fight Over Retiree Healthcare Rages, NYC Council Speaker Adams Says, ‘We are Still Trying to Get Clarity’

NYC municipal retirees rally outside City Hall on Oct. 12 against plans to push them into a for-profit private Medicare Advantage health insurance plan. Photo by Joe Maniscalco.

By Joe Maniscalco

There are better cost-saving alternatives to rewriting New York City’s Administrative Code and pushing a quarter of a million municipal retirees into a for-profit health insurance plan that’ll only make corporate fat cats fatter while delaying and denying medical care to people who worked for the city all their lives.

That’s the message retiree groups formed to fight back against the city’s plan to radically upend their traditional Medicare coverage are delivering to hard-pressed New York City Council members under increasing pressure to acquiesce to the will of Mayor Eric Adams and heads of the Municipal Labor Committee.

According to retirees, Medicare Advantage is a private health insurance scheme more accurately described as “Not-Medicare” and a “Dis-Advantage” to seniors.

In October, a panel of five state appeals-court judges presiding over ongoing litigation expressed skepticism about whether the city administration even had the legal footing to change retirees’ health coverage from traditional Medicare to a private for-profit Medicare Advantage plan.

New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, however, has told City Hall reporters, “It’s still under consideration.”

“I still can’t share much with you on it today because we are still being briefed on it as we speak,” she said on November 3. “It is very much in motion — it is moving, although we are still trying to get clarity on all sides of the issue.”

The speaker also said City Council member are “still discussing and still receiving briefings — I kid you not, on a daily basis.”

A spokesperson for Adrienne Adams later told Work-Bites the speaker was talking about the “topic overall and the developments around it. Not about the push to change the administrative code.”

Earlier this month, UFT President Michael Mulgrew argued changing the city’s Administrative Code and ushering in a Medicare Advantage plan would somehow give NYC the ability to tame the for-profit private health insurance industry — and its unchecked avarice.

“We at least have an agreement here with the city administration that we’re gonna try to do it differently,” Mulgrew told Work-Bites’ Bob Hennelly. “We’re not gonna fight with each other over the costs — we’re gonna try to strategize to fight against the industry.”

‘We Are Really Screwed’

Municipal retirees— many of them longtime UFT members — clearly think that’s a terrible idea.

“Changing the administrative code is a really bad idea because this is where we get our healthcare protection,” Cross-Union Retirees Organizing Committee organizer Sarah Shapiro told Work-Bites “It’s the only place we get it. It’s not in any collective bargaining agreement. It’s not in any union contract — it’s in the law. And if they get rid of that we are really screwed.”

Work-Bites recently talked about some obvious alternatives to changing the City of New York’s Administrative Code and doing what many say is a naked attempt to do an end-run around a state Supreme Court Judge’s ruling in March, which stymied the Medicare Advantage campaign.

Municipal retirees have cost-saving ideas as well, which they hope the “most progressive” City Council in New York City history will entertain just as seriously as the Medicare Advantage plan Mayor Adams and the heads of the MLC want.

“That’s what we are focusing on now — making sure the City Council knows we understand there is a problem — but there are alternative cost-saving measures that they can push for,” Shapiro said.

For example, Shapiro says, “There are cities in this country that run their own self insurance plans. It’s much more affordable because there’s no overhead to insurance companies. We don’t have to pay these insurance company presidents millions of dollars.”

Another alternative involves using the combined might of the city and organized labor to actually drive down hospital costs and prescription drug prices.

“There are also ways to negotiate with the hospitals for hospital billing,” Shapiro said. “The city has a lot of clout — and so do the unions. Sit down and tell them we have to rein back these high hospital costs. Group drug plans — every union has a drug plan — why don’t we just consolidate everything and we all get a group drug plan which is less costly?

CROC also says confronting bad management and inefficiencies associated with the delivery of healthcare in this town could also bring down costs — all without “throwing retirees under the bus.”

Shapiro also suggests money from NYC’s Retiree Health Benefit Trust fund could be used as “bridge” while the city seriously investigates other longtime solutions.

“We need a bridge right now to deal with this situation so that we have the time to really explore the right solutions because this is a Band-Aid that they are proposing [with Medicare Advantage] — not a longterm solution,” Shapiro said.

She also added, “It doesn’t seem like the appropriate people with the appropriate information have really spent the time to really look at these alternatives.”

Fellow CROC organizer and UFT retiree Martha Bordman says “The misinformation that’s been coming out” around the need to rewrite the Administrative Code and push municipal retirees into a Medicare Advantage plan is “just outrageous.”

“That’s one of the problems we want the City Council to realize,” Bordman told Work-Bites. “Michael Mulgrew and [Executive Director Henry] Garrido from District Council 37 are telling their members to call the City Council and tell them to vote for the code change because that’s gonna protect their choice of healthcare — it’s such a distortion of what’s really going on.”

Attempts to diminish retiree healthcare are nothing new — lots of New York City mayors have tried to do it, according to Marianne Pizzitola, president of the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees and the Fire Department EMS Retirees Association.

“Over the years, several different mayors tried to diminish our healthcare benefits,” Pizzitola told supporters at an anti-Medicare Advantage rally outside City Hall on Oct. 12. “They tried to take away our Medicare B reimbursement, and every single time City Council came through and helped us and made sure it did not get repealed or diminished. We need to make sure City Council does this once again.”

Pizzitola specifically cited late New York City Council Member Mary Pinkett — the first Black woman to service in the New York City Council — as a “champion for retirees and employees.”

“We need champions today,” Pizzitola said.