Eric Adams’ ‘Sweet Spot’ Feels Like a Knife in the Back to NYC Retirees Fighting to Save Their Medicare
New York City municipal retirees rally at City Hall Park on Oct. 23 in support of new City Council legislation aimed at protecting their existing Medicare benefits. Photos/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
New York City Mayor Eric Adams attempted some nifty ducking and diving when Work-Bites correspondent Bob Hennelly asked him pointblank on Tuesday why his administration persists in promoting Medicare Advantage.
“The law department will have to speak to you on that,” Hizzoner demurred at the City Hall press event before going on to bemoan the “increased cost of healthcare” as a rationale for continuing to push 250,000 municipal retirees into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan run by troubled insurance industry giant Aetna.
“What I do know is that the increased cost of healthcare is just unbelievable what we’re facing,” the mayor claimed. “We have to be able to find a sweet spot of being able to provide adequate healthcare without making it financially burdensome on retirees.”
But that “sweet spot” feels just like a knife in the back to the municipal retirees who’ve spent the last three years fighting the de Blasio and now Adams administration from stealing the traditional Medicare and MediGap coverage they were promised at the start of their civil service careers.
NYCOPSR President Marianne Pizzitola address rally in support of City Council Intro. 1096. The MLC has since urged City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams to oppose the measure.
New York State courts have consistently ruled in favor of retirees who denounce the Medicare Advantage push as a serious threat to their wellbeing and a diminishment of their existing Medicare benefits—and blocked the city from imposing the scheme.
Adams signed a five-year Medicare Advantage contract with Aetna back in March, 2023. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander later refused to register the pact. Adams registered it anyway, and continued to appeal his ongoing losses in court.
“Someone needs to point out that it is seniors’ tax monies that are being used to fight us,” New York City retiree and Cross-Union Organizing Committee [CROC] member Roberta Pikser told Work-Bites. “No wonder the Mayor is losing money. He is using it up in court.”
What Medicare Advantage purveyors including Mayor Adams steadfastly ignore are the extensively documented prior authorizations, delays and denials of care, and evaporating pools of participating doctors and hospitals that make the profit-driven plans entirely inadequate for those who need their healthcare when they need it—and not when private health insurance executives and their AI bots decide if and when to they can get it.
As former American Medical Association President Barbara McAneny recently told ProPublica, “They love to deny things.”
“This is a challenge that I inherited,” Mayor Adams continued on Tuesday. “That health care stabilization fund was healthy—it was healthy. I’m a retiree, so I’m not talking about something that impacts others. It impacts me as well. We need to find that sweet spot that taxpayer dollars are going to be utilized correctly.”
Mayor Eric Adams is determined to put New York City municipal retirees into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan they do not want.
The “health care stabilization fund” that the mayor was referencing, of course, was raided to help settle public sector union contracts following the disastrous era of former Mayor Mike Bloomberg—but has absolutely zero to do with the cost of Medicare eligible retirees. That stabilization fund covers active workers and under 65 retirees—not Medicare eligible retirees.
“They're trying to force their most vulnerable, mostly low-income people, into managed care with all the things that you know about it because [the mayor] thinks it's going to save money,” New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees [NYCOPSR] President Marianne Pizzitola told Work-Bites. “Meanwhile, the Medicare population is the least expensive to the city. He's so clueless.”
In reality, the City of New York has been covering the cost of the retiree MediGap—the 20 percent that traditional Medicare doesn’t cover—for decades. It’s the reason why New Yorkers are urged to get a “good city job”—because they know that in retirement they’ll be able to see any doctor anytime they need.
At the same time, however, there have always been those in New York City government who have tried to use every budgetary crisis—real or conjured—to claim the city can no longer afford its obligations to retirees. As Pizzitola points out, former Office of Labor Relations Commissioner Bob Linn—instrumental in agreements involving the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] and the Joint Health Stabilization Fund in 2014 and 2018—has been trying to spike the city’s commitment to municipal retirees since the Koch administration.
“The union should never have been allowed to negotiate away someone's benefit that is no longer in their union,” Pizzitola said. “The retirees are not in any union. They might be connected to a retiree organization, but they're not union members that the union has any authority to collectively bargain for—I believe [OLR and Bob Linn] committed an improper practice by allowing the unions to negotiate away retirees benefits.”
“It’s a concern,” Mayor Adams went on this week. “Renee Campion, the [current OLR] commissioner, the MLC—we’ve sat down at the table several times to find a solution to this problem that is costing us billions. It’s a real issue that we’re facing.”
It may be a real concern—but it’s one that the City of New York’s mayor simply refuses to address in any way that does not allow him to push municipal retirees into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage health insurance plan they reject.
“The City has been clear,” Law Dept. spokesperson Nicholas Paolucci told Work-Bites when we followed up this week. “Its plan, which was negotiated closely with and supported by the Municipal Labor Committee, would improve upon retirees’ current plans and save hundreds of millions of dollars annually. This is particularly important at a time when we are already facing significant fiscal and economic challenges.”
Once again, “negotiated closely” with the MLC doesn’t mean anything if the members of that organization cannot negotiate on behalf of municipal retirees. Add the fact that United Federation of Teachers [UFT] President Michael Mulgrew—one third of the triumvirate calling the shots at the MLC—pulled out of the Medicare Advantage push back in June, and it’s impossible not to conclude that New York City municipal retirees are not being stabbed in the back.
As this story was going to press, Work-Bites learned that the MLC has sent a letter to City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams urging her to block Intro. 1096—new legislation introduced by Council Member Chris Marte aimed at protecting municipal retirees’ existing health benefits from the Medicare Advantage push.
“Intro 1096 is violative of law and should not be permitted to proceed,” the heads of the MLC wrote. Work-Bites will have more on this shortly.
Meanwhile, Adams’ Democratic Partly colleagues at the head of the Senate Finance, House Energy and Commerce, and the House Ways and Means committees all devoted part of their week highlighting some of Medicare Advantage’s many abuses and calling on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to somehow “rein in” the program’s “rampant misuse of prior authorization[s].”