‘Don’t Bother Me!’ MLC OKs New Health Plan for NYC Workers Over Ongoing Protests
Who’s on the hook? Truck parked outside the offices of DC37 yesterday during the MLC’s vote on a new health plan for municipal workers asks some questions the MLC does not want to answer. Photos/Steve Wishnia
By Steve Wishnia
The city’s Municipal Labor Committee overwhelmingly approved a new health-insurance plan for current city workers and pre-Medicare retirees on Sept. 30, as protesters objected that union leaders had given out only minimal information about its details.
“None of us have read the contract,” said Migdalia Acevedo, president of Chapter 3 of District Council 37’s Local 375, one of about 15 people picketing outside DC37’s headquarters during the vote. “Our union leadership has systematically excluded us from conversations and participation in matters that affect us.”
Union delegates were only allowed to look at a “highly redacted” version of the 300-page plan during a meeting, Acevedo told Work-Bites. Chapter 3 represents technical workers at city-run hospitals and clinics.
The plan received 88% of the votes of the union leaders present, the MLC said in a statement. The votes were weighted by the size of their membership. The supporters included 44 DC37 locals, the United Federation of Teachers, the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association, Teamsters Local 237, and correction and probation officers’ unions. The no votes came from five police and firefighters’ unions, including the Police Benevolent Association, and two DC37 locals. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 3 and the Professional Staff Congress, which represents City University faculty and staff, abstained.
Dubbed the NYC Employees PPO Plan, it will replace the current GHI Comprehensive Benefits Plan for the next five years. It will be offered jointly by EmblemHealth and UnitedHealthcare, and cover 750,000 people—active workers, retirees not yet eligible for Medicare, and their dependents—according to the MLC.
The MLC said the plan would “improve benefits, expand the network of providers while allowing our members to keep their existing doctors, and maintain premium-free health care without increasing out-of-pocket costs.” The UFT said in a message on its website that premiums for the GHI plan had doubled in the past 10 years, with the premiums the city pays for individual coverage rising from about $6,000 per year to nearly $12,000, and family coverage going from slightly under $16,000 to more than $31,000.
“We secured improved benefits for less,” the UFT said, achieving it “by leveraging our buying power.” With 750,000 customers, it added, “getting our business would be a win for any insurer. As a result, health insurance companies competed for us as customers and came to the table with reduced prices and an enhanced plan that they wouldn't offer to smaller groups.”
Protesters were highly skeptical of those claims. Neal Frumkin, a retired DC 37 shop steward, pointed at a truck with a video sign that demanded, “Are we on the hook if the plan doesn’t save a billion dollars like you promised?”
“If we don’t save the $1 billion, will copays go up?” he asked. “We don’t know.”
Protesters begin to gather outside the offices of DC37 yesterday ahead of the MLC’s vote on a sweeping new healthcare plan impacting 750,000 active municipal workers and pre-Medicare retirees.
“Pay less—get more” is hard to believe, former UFT official Amy Arundell told Work-Bites earlier this month. Is it possible to get fewer prior authorizations while paying lower premiums? Will there be tiered pricing for care at different hospitals?
“We can’t have access to the fine print,” she said.
“It’s all about transparency and trust,” Michelle Keller of the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees told Work-Bites. “Health care is a human right. It’s a mandatory subject of bargaining. Our young workers and retirees demand security, to know the providers, the networks, the prior authorizations, and the burdensome hidden costs.”
City retirees, she added, learned in their four-and-a-half-year battle against Medicare Advantage that “secrets can be costly.”
The truck sign also demanded that the union leaders not vote until they’d seen “the full unredacted contract with appendices” and “the prior authorization list and how often [it] can be changed.”
“It’s incredible that union folks would take a vote without knowing the answers to those questions,” Frumkin told Work-Bites. “You can’t make an informed decision without seeing the actual contract.”
A Local 375 member, a forester with the Parks Department on Staten Island who gave only his first name, Evon, said that at a membership meeting the previous night, the local’s president “admitted he hadn’t read it in full.” Local 375 gave its vote by proxy to DC 37 head Henry Garrido.
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office told amNewYork that “some details have been shared with the MLC because health benefits are a mandatory subject of bargaining,” but “they would not be shared outside the collective bargaining process until the appropriate stage in the city’s procurement process.”
The truck sign also asked what was going to happen to the PICA drug plan. That covers psychotropics, injectables, chemotherapy, and asthma medications, whose costs range from expensive to “astronomical,” Frumkin explained. The prices have forced it to drop coverage for psychiatric and asthma drugs, he said.
The money for the program, about $500 million, has come from the city’s Health Stabilization Fund, he notes. The city and union leaders’ motive for trying to switch retirees to Medicare Advantage was to replenish that fund. If it’s broke, Frumkin asks, where is money for PICA going to come from?
As the leaders of various locals approached the building’s entrance, the protesters chanted “Show us the contract” and “Transparency, not mystery.” A woman from DC 37 Local 3005, representing various Department of Health workers, smiled and waved; she would vote no.
Teamsters Local 237 President Gregory Floyd, who would vote yes, had a different reaction. “Don’t bother me,” he snapped.