Written and edited by Norm Scott:
EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!! MOBILIZE!!!
Three pillars of The Resistance – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We link up with bands of resisters. Nothing will change unless WE ALL GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!
It’s beyond disheartening to learn
what a miserable job our negotiators did for us in 2018. All our hours
on the Contract Committee were wasted, since leadership made a
counter-productive deal behind our back. They sacrificed our health care
to win only modest gains. Our Contract Committee is a sham, UFT has the
worst negotiating team in the world, and every member of that team
should be impeached or fired. --AG
Another brilliant piece from Arthur - for the record - I couldn't vote on the 2018 contract but urged a NO vote - why? Because I never trust the UFT/Unity Caucus leadership on contracts - or other issues. But also note - they claim their plan is not Joe Namath. How do we know?
Then-Mayor de Blasio speaks to the UFT (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
A long-time UFT chapter leader I know
used to joke, “There are two things wrong with our union—the leadership
and the membership.” I’ve been very involved with the teachers union,
both in opposition and alongside leadership, and I couldn’t agree more.
That two-pronged problem with our union is evident in the saga over
major changes to health care for retired and current teachers.
Retiree Advocate is doing a zoom on Sunday Nov. 6 7PM to address questions people may have and to expose the confusion created by the the joint operation of the city and some of the unions, led by Mulgrew in the UFT and DC 37, the largest components who dominate the MLC (Metropolitan Labor Committee) who make deals with the city that control our health care. We may not have all the answers but we have some answers. We are hoping to have Marianne Pizzitola join us but if she can't make it we have some knowledgeable people.
MORE is planning another zoom in the same issue a week later at the same time and Marianne is definitely going to be there.
Exposing the Adams/Mulgrew Threat to Our Healthcare: Untangling the Confusion
This Sunday, Nov 6 at 7PM, Retiree Advocate/UFT is holding a Zoom Info Meeting to share what we know - and what we don't know - regarding the current healthcare crisis in our unions.
Learn what role Mulgrew and other union leaders in the MLC have been playing in partnership with Mayor Adams and the Office of Labor Relations.
New information is coming in constantly and we are trying to stay up to date. This meeting will share info & analysis, and try to answer your questions.
Attendance will be limited to 100. Meeting will be recorded for those who cannot make it.
Here are some comments I gleaned from some of the listserve discussions after a district rep sent out an appeal to chapter leaders to get their staffs to call the city council to change the admin code. As Jonathan says in his current blog: Administrative Code 12-126 – Line by line:
The code today means:
“The City pays an amount equal to the cost of HIP”
The code if the Mulgrew/Nespoli/Adams amendment goes through will say:
The City pays the cost
of HIP, and no more than that, or else some other amount – and that
amount could be different for different groups of city workers, and
there is no limit on how low those amounts might be.
When you call your city council member, please explain this to them
as you urge them to protect workers and retirees, and reject the
amendment.
Comments from RA listserve:
It's
pure pap! All one has to do is read the amendment language. Your DR is
asking you to not believe your own eyes or use your own brain. The
amendment reaffirms nothing because Judge Frank's ruling changed
absolutely nothing. His ruling merely said that retirees are protected
from paying premiums, specifically on the now-dormant Medicare Advantage
Plus plan, because of price protections built into the city code.
It's not hard to understand the amendment. Just look at it. It does two things and two things only: First it strips
healthcare price protections, for ALL current and retired municipal
employees, by yanking those protections out of city law, and placing
them in the hands of OLR lawyers and union bosses. Second, it allows city bureaucrats to classify municipal employees into separate, as yet undefined, categories. That's a prospect that begs the creation of tiered, unequal levels of coverage for past and present city workers.
I bet your DR wouldn't wish that on her mother's health plan!
, or in the alternative,
This means, "What was said before this doesn't count."
in
the case of any class of individuals eligible for coverage by a plan
jointly agreed upon by the city and the municipal labor committee to be a
benchmark plan for such class,
This means,
"For anyone and everyone in city employment, the benchmark price -
formerly established as the cost of the HIP-HMO plan, and until now
protected by this law - can now be chosen by the MLC and OLR. We don't
need no stinkin' law, made by stinkin' elected legislators, to tell us
what to do! And if we want to, we can have multiple plans, and multiple
benchmark prices, for multiple classes of people, and we can change that
any time we like. So there!"
not to exceed the full cost of such benchmark plan as applied to such class.
This means, "When we say your brand new benchmark plan costs only ten bucks, but you want to stay in your old plan; the one that costs five hundred bucks - and that we will still offer because we believe in freedom of choice - no
problem! Just cough up the $490. But hey, if you want, you can have our
super-duper $5 or $8 plan for free! Because, you know, choice!"
And some Media links to articles:
An excellent article below from Work-Bites
Beware of the Mad Dash to Medicare Advantage
By Joe Maniscalco
Commentary
So, some of the most powerful people in town are warning the rest of us that the most pressing — the most urgent — the most vital issue — facing the City of New York right now is the need to immediately privatize healthcare for municipal retirees — or else. I dunno about you, but this kind of thing reminds me of that time working people were told we had to bail out the big banks.
Remember, it wasn’t that long ago when then U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson put up a scary countdown clock and told everyone in the country we had to cough up $700 billion to bail out the financial sector — right away — no time for talk — no deliberation — or all was lost.
Paulson got his money.
A few years later writing for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi called TARP — the Troubled Asset Relief Program — a “lush nightmare of unintended consequences” and “one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people.”
The City Council must enable budget-cutting new health
insurance options for retirees, warns Eric Adams’s chief labor
negotiator — or City Hall will eliminate existing insurance plans
Saturday, September 24 -- I almost lost track since I tested positive for covid for first time this week -- I can still type.
When did our unions become the fiscal hound dogs like Adams? Imagine he comes to the UFT and says no money for class size reductions but if every UFT member pays 191 bucks month we can make it happen. Let's pay for our own contract like Mulgrew is asking retirees to pay for what was free.
I got a call asking me to get more involved in the city council lobbying campaign being hit hard my our UFT misleaders who are telling the council people that the Unity Caucus stacked UFT retiree health committee supports changing the admin code which will free the unions and the city to offer me a choice of their privatized Med Adv plan or I can stick with my currently free plan for the cost of almost $400 a month for me and my wife. The city has been paying $191 a month for each of us to cover the 20% senior care uncovered by Medicare. Now I'd have to pick that up. I've been told that if the UFT gets its way, the city costs would drop to $7 a month per UFT member. That number should get us great coverage. But they can only get around the court case by convincing the council to change the admin code from 1967 which forces the city to pay much higher fees.
The reason was that the city wanted to only pay the 20% that Medicare didn't way and this addition to the code was viewed as a money saver in 1967. Even the massive fiscal crisis of the 70s didn't lead to calls to change the code.
Thanks a lot. And by the way, there are a bunch of Retiree Advocate (the caucus) members on that committee who oppose the changes but are given no voice at the town halls. The lobbyists on our side want to show the city council that the UFT top is a locked box where rank and file voices are stifled.
I got a quick primer on what exactly is going on with the changes. The admin code provision goes back to 1967 and covers retirees and working members for guaranteed city coverage of over $900 per member for health coverage. Due to Mulgrew 2014 raid of the stabilization fund to cover the raises for working teachers contract with back pay after 9 years without a contract, and a 2018 agreement to help the city cover healthcare costs, the unions owe the city a billion dollars and selling out the members on healthcare is the only way.
Actually, rather than have me interpret, watch this video from Marianne Pizzitola- a sentence by sentence explanation of the admin code - https://youtu.be/SiveIIwCaPc
Let me just interject that the two main competitors for the city contract are Emblem (which pulled out after the recent debacles over the court case) and CVS owned Aetna - by the way note this about the people we want to run our healthcare --
Yeah, these are the people I want our union to hand a $38 billion contract.
Eterno comments on ICEUFT blog:
The Municipal Labor Committee (an umbrella group of over 100 city government unions) is working with the city to try to get the City Council to change the Administrative Code (city law) on city employee healthcare benefits.
The UFT Contract entitles UFTers to a choice of premium free healthcare plans (see Article 3G1). The change in the law would make it only a choice of health plans. This is part of a checklist on what the UFT is currently doing that is part of the Chapter Leader Update:
Lobbying the New York City Council to amend the administrative code to state explicitly that the city must negotiate with the Municipal Labor Committee on all employee health care plans and must allow that city unions may negotiate for employees to have health care plan choices.
Notice they don't say choice of free healthcare plans. A judge threw out the city-MLC's attempt to move Medicare-eligible retirees into a Medicare Advantage Plan (privatized healthcare or what we termed Mulgrewcare) or pay premiums for what they have now.
The city is trying to change the law so they can easily end choices for premium-free coverage and impose the inferior Mulgrewcare. They could then charge around $400 a month for couples to keep traditional Medicare-Seniorcare that today costs $0 in premiums. Unions like the Professional Staff Congress are opposing the change. The city and MLC will be able to end premium-free healthcare choices for active UFTers and non Medicare retirees if the change passes in the City Council.
Here is a supporting response from Tiffany Caban, one of the most progressive city council members, a Dem Socialist (boo to you corp dems and republicans):
Good morning,
Thanks for taking the time to write. Our office is supportive of
retiree's having a choice in their healthcare coverage. CM Cabán was
among the signers of the Open Letter to cancel the proposed Medicare
Advantage Plus plan (attached) and continues to support
the current Medicare/Senior Care health insurance coverage for
municipal retirees. We are keeping an eye out for any legislation on
this topic that may appear in Council.
Best,
Steph Silkowski (she/her)
Chief of Staff
Council Member Tiffany Cabán
District 22, Queens
The above is in response to a letter from a UFT retiree on the Retiree Advocate listserve:
Dear Council Member Caban,
I am on your mailing list because I have supported you in the past. I believe we share the same political philosophy.
I am 78 years old, and my wife is 77. We are being threatened with a severe reduction in our healthcare by the plan to eviscerate the protection provided to New York City retirees and their spouses by § 12-126 of the city administrative code since 1967. The proposed changes would eliminate the cost-free guarantee to retirees and would pave the way to completely privatizing our Medicare/Senior Care.
The Medicare Advantage private insurance plan that would be forced upon us is significantly inferior to our current plan, which was cost-free until co-pays were recently added (in violation of §12-126) for breathing near any healthcare provider (slight exaggeration). That plan, or whatever replaces it, since Anthem pulled out, has a restricted network of providers, imposes financial liability on retirees if their out-of-network doctors do not obtain “prior authorization”, and, most important, incentivizes the private insurance company to deny expensive medical procedures, as they are allowed to keep anything they don’t spend on care.
Medicare Advantage companies typically deny medical procedures at a much higher rate than Medicare itself does, even though they are supposed to use the same rules. It’s all in the interpretation of those rules as applied, and depends completely on who is doing the interpreting. Last April, the HHS Inspector General came out with a scathing report exposing the significantly higher rate of denials of care by Medicare Advantage companies as compared to Medicare itself.
When an expensive procedure gets denied by the Medicare Advantage company, what happens? Either the patient goes without the necessary procedure, suffering health consequences or even death, or the patient comes up with the money somehow, and saves her own life by paying for what Medicare would have covered in the first place. THIS IS NOT A COST-FREE PLAN. The cost can be enormous. It violates §12-126, which requires cost-free healthcare (not merely premium-free). And there is no way to remedy this by tweaking the plan. It is the Medicare Advantage business model to spend less on healthcare by denying expensive procedures.
That’s why the Mayor and the complicit Municipal Labor Committee is now asking the City Council to destroy our guarantee of cost-free health care since 1967 by undoing §12-126.
Please, we beg you, do everything in your power to stop this atrocity.
