NYC Comptroller Gets Aetna Contract; Retirees Fighting to Save Traditional Medicare Call BS on City Council Inaction

Hundreds of NYC municipal retirees and their supporters rallied outside City Hall last month. They will be back on May 24. Photo by Joe Maniscalco

By Joe Maniscalco

Stripping New York City municipal retirees of their traditional Medicare benefits and pushing them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage program will not deliver the $600 million savings Mayor Eric Adams’ administration claims it will.

Members of two of the most prominent retiree advocacy groups in the city fighting to save their traditional Medicare benefits tell Work-Bites they’ve recently had conversations with NYC Comptroller Brad Lander — the city’s chief financial officer and auditor — where he expressed his doubts about the highly-touted $600 million savings the deal is supposed to bring.

The Adams administration, despite then-mayoral candidate Eric Adams denouncing Medicare Advantage on the campaign trail as a “bait and switch,” signed a Medicare Advantage contract at the tail-end of March with insurance giant Aetna, which will impact some 250,000 municipal retirees and their families. It’s now up to New York City Comptroller Brad Lander’s office to review the deal and either okay it, or kick it back to the mayor.

That’s what Lander did last year, when the city was pushing a Medicare Advantage contract with Anthem Insurance Companies.

According to Marianne Pizzitola, president of the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees & FDNY EMS Retirees, Lander expressed his dislike for healthcare privatization at a meeting held last Friday, and said that while the City of New York will see savings as a result of the federal subsidies involved — they’re not so big that they couldn’t be covered through a variety of other ways.

A couple of weeks prior to that, members of the Cross-Union Retirees Organizing Committee [CROC] attending a political fundraiser with Lander in Park Slope, Brooklyn, discussed the supposed $600 million the City of New York will purportedly save stripping municipal retirees of their traditional Medicare benefits and pushing them into a Medicare Advantage program.

Here, too, CROC member Martha Cameron recalls the comptroller expressing similar doubts about the alleged $600 million savings.

“He said the city, at best, is going to save maybe $300 or $400 million on this,” Cameron told Work-Bites.

Retiree advocates have long-held the $600 million saving the Adams administration says will be achieved by pushing 250,000 municipal retirees and their families into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage program is spurious.

Lander’s office received the Aetna Medicare Advantage contract late on Thursday evening, May 11. And it now has 30 calendar days to complete its review.

“While Comptroller Lander is deeply concerned, as a matter of policy, about Medicare privatization and the impacts of the change to Medicare Advantage for retiree health care outcomes, the office’s authority is limited to ensuring that public dollars are being used in accordance with applicable procurement rules,” spokesperson Chloe Chik told Work-Bites in an email. “ The Comptroller’s Bureau of Contract Administration will conduct a rigorous review of the contract to determine whether it was properly procured.”

Pizzitola says retirees “always knew the $600 million savings was a ruse” because “even according to the lastest actuary report the cost to the city was only about $439 million for retiree healthcare.”

New York City municipal retiree advocates have proposed legislation sitting in the New York City Council aimed at protecting traditional Medicare benefits from privatization. Speaker Adrienne Adams, however, has blocked it from coming to the floor for a vote.

When Work-Bites asked for a status update on the measure and why Speaker Adams hasn’t allowed it to come to the floor for a vote, City Council spokesperson Rendy Desamours said the proposed legislation is “not too dissimilar from the one that we had the hearing for in January.”

“And we heard a bunch of people say that they did not want it to pass,” he said. “I think at this point this is something that would interfere, and get in front of these negotiations that the MLC [Municipal Labor Committee] and the administration have had — and that’s not a place where the council is party to. That’s not anything different from like, contract negotiations — we’re not party to those kinds of agreements.”

None of that holds water for municipal retirees who know how city government actually works and can recall decades past when City Council champions including Mary Pinkett — the first Black woman elected to the New York City Council — and Peter Vallone helped beat back attacks on municipal retirees’ Medicare Part B reimbursements.

"This was all done with perfect legitimacy and legality when the Taylor law was already in place since 1967,” Michael Antwerp, Protect Traditional Public Medicare Facebook group member, told Work-Bites. “So, the city using the Taylor law as a defense for not having the City Council address this Medicare Advantage fiasco is, in my opinion, fallacious, deceptive, and intentionally distracting. We’re not falling for it.”

Pizzitola calls using collective bargaining rights or the Taylor law as justification for the City Council’s failure to do something to protect traditional Medicare benefits a “load of horse-hockey.”

“Our bill is two sentences long and it basically says that the city has to offer a Medigap supplemental plan…and the second sentence says nothing in this bill prevents the unions from collectively bargaining for its unit members,” Pizzitola told Work-Bites. “I am not unit member, I not a member of a union, the union cannot represent me under collective bargaining law and the Taylor law. This whole ruse that this is subjected to collective bargaining is a load of horse-hockey.”

City retiree Roberta Pikser says what this all really comes down to is “taking away deferred compensation” from municipal retirees like her who worked decades believing they’d have healthcare at the end of it. The City Council could, Pikser insists, “certainly pass legislation stating that retiree healthcare is to be enshrined.”

“In fact,” Pikser told Work-Bites, “that is, in a way, what [Administrative Code] 12-126 says — it’s just isn’t as specific as we need it to be. I think the English translation is — they do not want to stick their necks out for us.”

Len Rodberg, a retired Urban Studies professor at Queens College, says the New York City Council created Administrative Code 12-126 to give municipal retirees premium free benefits — and it can “act again now so that retires can continue to have premium free access to Medicare.”

“Neither the Taylor law, nor the unions are involved,” he told Work-Bites.

Cross-Union Organizing Committee member Sarah Shapiro is equally fed up.

“My message to the City Council is don't just sit there — do something!” she told Work-Bites in an email. “I'm tired of hearing all the excuses for inaction. Stop using the Taylor law as an excuse to do nothing. The Taylor law is for active employees — not retirees. Bring forward the retiree bill. Put retiree healthcare into this massive $105 billion [city] budget. There's got to be some money for our healthcare which is only 6/10 of 1% of the city's budget. This is beyond shameful. We are talking about saving our lives — literally.”

New York City municipal retirees fighting to retain their traditional Medicare coverage will hold a “People’s Hearing & Rally” outside City Hall at 9:30 a.m. on May 24.

“I didn’t know New York City Council members were not supposed to represent their constituents or go to bat for them,” retiree Martha Bordman told Work-Bites. “So, what they’re saying is that the job of the City Council is to sit on its hands and let the mayor and the MLC make major decisions that negatively affect NYC municipal retirees because City Council members don’t want to interfere? Why do we elect them then? What a sorry state of affairs.”