Our leadership is willing to sacrifice our health care needs for their own narrow political ends.
That may not be such an easy sell as:
...it looks like Mulgrewcare might eventually be coming to active people. Only a judge stopped a healthcare plan that would have denied a choice of free plans for retirees. We called the inferior plan Mulgrewcare.--- James Eterno, ICEUFT Blog
This is not only a local but a national issue as a project of the Dem party since the Clinton days:
A Biden administration official in charge of the program has said they intend to have all the traditional Medicare beneficiaries in such for-profit programs by 2030..... Daily Kos
And the UFT/AFT/NYSUT anti progressive agenda is tied to Dem Center right corporatists where the health care industry pores millions of lobbying dollars.
Saturday, June 25, 2022
There's a lot on this plate for you to chew on. Retiree Advocate continues to work toward fighting the attempt by the city and our own beloved union to remove us from Medicare and into a higher expense MedAdv plan to save money. Someone explain how much higher expenses save money unless it comes out of services.
June 30 will be a year since our big march and rally to protest MulgrewCare. Posts from June/July 2021:
Last week we had another rally at city hall. I've been trying to keep up with the story:
And James has an update:
- ICEUFT Blog ACTIVE CITY WORKERS NEED TO WATCH OUT FOR UNIONS DISCUSSING HEALTHCARE SAVINGS - UFT Chapter Leader Update: Efforts begin to rein in health care costs. The Municipal Labor Committee, the umbrella group of nearly 100 municipal labor unions including the UFT, negotiates the health care benefits of all city workers. The top priority of the MLC and the UFT is to maintain high-quality, premium-free health care for all city workers even as costs increase year after year. The city, with the MLC’s support, issued a request for information on June 16 to let the health care industry know that the city is seeking a 10% decrease in health care costs without sacrificing any of its employees’ existing benefits
This cutout from the article on the Machinists resistance sums up the situation:
the Medicare direct contracting pilot program that Trump initiated where equity firms and insurance companies could come in and basically buy up clinics and medical facilities and move people over to that private system without having to really notify them or explain to Medicare recipients that they were now in a different system,” Lux told the members..... there is about $1.6 trillion in the Medicare Trust Fund that these private equity firms and insurance companies are just waiting to get at—to make a profit
While we know it's impossible that we will see Medicare for All nationally, there is the NY Health Act which both the UFT and DC 37 oppose. Why? One answer is they employ many people to handle our healthcare and those, often patronage, jobs would disappear. The other is that they can claim to members that the leadership has delivered health care and once that's out of their hands, what else can they deliver? Bupkus. So our leadership is willing to sacrifice our health care needs for their own narrow political ends.
It is important to connect what's happening locally with the national trend which is privatization to save money on the backs of the patients while insuring massive profits to industry. I posted a story from The Lever on how Biden is pushing privatization:
BTW - Biden has appointed a guy who wants to privatize social security too.
Reality check -- 2024 will be a disaster and will have the even more awful Rep a trifecta and a DeSantis will be a smart Trump and give us our own Viktor Orban. For me the only Dem who could have a chance is John Fetterman but given his health etc that is a dim chance. Pete or Harris? OY! We're dead.
Here are two more stories to check out: An update from the lawsuit that has stopped MulgrewCare so far and -- this union is fighting back:
