The city's Medicare Advantage ruse

When retirees talk about the "Big Lie," they are referring to the ruse that the city forcing retirees off traditional Medicare and into Medicare Advantage will save money. It has been repeated so often that electeds and journalists say it but it is not true. 

Here is the proof that Medicare Advantage does not save money. And to that end, I never thought I would have lived to see unions agree to give up health care and pass costs to workers, and make them jump through hurdles to access medical care, but this is what the leaders of the Municipal Labor Committee did. 

The other “Big Lie” is unions collectively bargain for retirees. That is false on its face as state and city law only allows a union to bargain for wages, hours and work conditions. Retirees do not have those. Instead, what they are really saying is that they want to be able to liquidate the benefits of a current retiree to fund their contract.

Over the last three years, even after begging the current City Council to do the right thing, as Councils had before this one, and protect retirees' health care, our pleas were blatantly ignored - defiantly at times — and they accepted the lies a few union leaders have spread. 

In fact, had anyone listened to our presentation, they would have known that in 1967, a personnel order from  Mayor John Lindsay gave city employees health care paid for by the city could not grant the same benefit to retirees in the same way. Why? Because they were not employees and were not represented by unions. Lindsay, in effect, had to legislate health care for retirees. He enlisted two councilmen to do it. The Council then passed a law known as 12-126 of the NYC Administrative Code. Since then, the law has been amended a few times by the City Council, for instance to extend health care to spouses of deceased workers and to ensure premium reimbursement.

The Independent Budget Office testified in 2021 and 2023 before the Council that the shift would not save money. In 2023, Council Member Charles Barron invited NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees attorney Jake Gardener and me to appear before the Council Progressive and Brooklyn Caucuses to explain our position. We were questioned why we were asking them to get involved! They had no knowledge that Lindsay and the Council had legislated health benefits for retirees that were not collectively bargained, which is why the Council passed all previous bills to maintain Medicare B Reimbursement over the years to protect current retirees. Council Member Althea Stevens even asked the IBO what savings would be achieved by this change. The reply was that legislation introduced by Barron to preserve our benefits would have no financial impact to the city and because current retirees’ health care is legislated and funding is mandated by statute.

Look in any collective bargaining agreement, nothing speaks to current retiree benefits — and that is because retirees are not in unions — but the labor leaders of yesterday ALWAYS protected these benefits — until recently.

Medicare retirees' health plan only pays 20 percent of their medical bills, unlike an active worker where the plan pays 100 percent. Medicare retirees are the least expensive to the city. What the United Federation of Teachers and District Council 37, together with with several other city unions, agreed to do was privatize a federal public health benefit, eliminate choices of plans for everyone, force everyone into managed care with a narrow network of doctors and hospitals, and allow managed-care corporation Aetna to be a gatekeeper between retirees and the treatment and tests doctors order. That does not exist with traditional Medicare. The value of the senior care plan that was sold back to the City was going into a pot of money that was often misused by the Municipal Labor Committee and mayors and paid for raises for active workers. 

There is no nice way to say that. Some union leaders led the push to literally sell off the choice of health plans of retired unionists to fund their contracts. Many unions in the MLC were angry over this, but because of the weighted voting structure (every union gets one vote for every 250 members). Essentially, DC37 and the UFT can pass motions on their own without the backing of the other 100 unions that make up the MLC. 

The MLC can act like a coalition but has no bargaining rights unless the unions in the coalition agree to participate in the coalition and convey their bargaining power to the MLC. A fairer vote would be one union, one vote since EVERY union member is valuable. The two largest municipal unions — who sold the fib that the privatized version of Medicare was “enhanced” and “better” than traditional Medicare — should not be making decisions that negatively impact smaller unions.

I am going to say this loud and clear to every union worker reading this paper: Your future health benefits are at stake unless you get involved and protect what was promised to you!

To fund the UFT contract in 2014, and the DC37 contract in 2018, they liquidated retiree health care benefits and tried to privatize federal Medicare. Shocking, right? More so is that this shift to privatizing Medicare and pushing us all into one plan (with a narrow network where the insurer becomes a gatekeeper delaying and denying the care your doctor orders) is the default plan in the Project 2025 blueprint the national unions have denounced. Why then are the City and the leaders of the MLC trying to implement this? 

Once you retire, the maximum cost of living adjustment you will ever receive is $540 a year. If the MLC continues to pass copays and deductibles on to retirees and forces us to pay for our doctors because they are not in the network of the single plan they want for us, you will never be able to afford to go to the doctor.

Marianne Pizzitola, a retired emergency medical technician, is president of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees and the FDNY EMS Retirees Association.