Medicare Dis-Advantage Creates the Haves and the Have Nots Inside New York City Transit
TWU Local 100 active workers and retirees rally outside MTA NYCT headquarters in Brooklyn to demand restoration of their Medicare health insurance coverage. Photos/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
They work on the same subway tracks and roads. They help move the same people throughout New York City. But Metropolitan Transit Authority employees represented by TWU Local 100 and the Subway-Surface Supervisors Association do not experience retirement the same.
SSSA retirees still enjoy the full medical benefits guaranteed through traditional Medicare—i.e. real Medicare—they originally signed up for and a union leadership bound and determined “never ever to give them up.”
TWU Local 100 retirees, on the other hand, this year became subject to the delays and denials of care and diminishing pools of participating doctors and hospitals that are the hallmarks of profit-driven Medicare Advantage plans claiming lower out-of-pocket costs and silly gym memberships.
And they’ve got to contend with union leadership—like the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] before them—who were all too happy at the start of 2024 to kiss retirees’ Medicare coverage goodbye forever.
“They should not be labor leaders in my book,” SSSA President Michael Carrube told Work-Bites this week. “I don't have any respect for none of them. They put their unions back fifty, sixty years. They put them back to the days when you didn't have any medical when you retired. You went out—and that was it. It was over.”
Carrube’s administration represents roughly 4,200 workers serving in various supervisory roles throughout the MTA New York City Transit system. The SSSA under Carrube is so passionate about protecting the traditional Medicare coverage members earned on the job, that not only are they steadfastly rejecting the MTA’s Medicare Advantage push at the bargaining table—they’re revising the union’s constitution to “tie the hands” of any future SSSA leaders who might one day decide it’s a good idea to “give away” members’ existing Medicare coverage.
“A retiree is a retiree—end of story,” Carrube added. “I’m a firm believer that if your retiree membership does not vote for a contract then no president or any presidential administration should ever give up or negotiate away a retiree's lifetime benefit—because [retirees] don't vote.”
If any of those labor leaders in the City of New York who did give up that lifetime benefit wanted to “negotiate something in their medical plan,” Carrube said it “shouldn’t have affected the retirees.”
TWU Local 100 retirees haven’t taken the Medicare Advantage push lying down, however. Far from it. Like their municipal counterparts fighting Mayor Eric Adams’ ongoing campaign to try and force 250,000 city workers into an Aetna Medicare Advantage plan, they are actively challenging TWU Local 100 Presidnt Richard Davis’ pro-privatization agenda in court.
They’re also organizing and building stronger opposition to the Aetna Medicare Advantage plan TWU Local 100 rolled out on January 1. Both active and retired TWU Local 100 members have begun holding pro-Medicare actions outside MTA New York City Transit headquarters at 180 Livingston Street in Downtown, Brooklyn in a further effort to raise rank and file awareness about the “Medicare Dis-Advantage” switcheroo pulled off under their noses.
“We’re finding out there are still a lot of retirees who don't know about this [Medicare Advantage switch] until they get into the hospital, or to the doctor and the doctor no longer accepts Medicare Advantage,” TWU Local 100R President Lloyd Archer told Work-Bites when we recently visited one of those Livingston Street actions. “Some just don't go to the doctor. But once they do, they get in a panic not knowing what their next move is.”
As Work-Bites has previously reported, struggling TWU Local 100 retirees now living out-of-state with Medicare Advantage have been hit particularly hard when attempting to secure the medical care they need.
Taking it to the streets: TWU Local 100 retirees and active workers are demanding the restoration of traditional—i.e. real—Medicare coverage.
“During the 2023 contract we were told that the president of the union at TWU Local 100 was enhancing the retiree medical benefit,” union member Evangeline Byars told Work-Bites at that same street action in Brooklyn. “But in fact, it was a diminishment of benefits. So, what our retirees are experiencing is a departure from the negotiation of 2002—which ensured that they had lifetime medical coverage and that the CPPO was covered by the Transit Authority. Now, if they don't receive care, if they don't get approved by their doctors—then the next course [of action] is on them. We have members who are having hip replacements and being forced out of rehabilitation centers. All of those things are now affecting us.”
Active TWU Local 100 members who are young and healthy with many years ahead of them before they retire may not be thinking about those kinds of concerns—but Byars and other Medicare Advantage opponents insist they very well should.
“If you’re an active member and you become Medicare eligible you go into those same Medicare Advantage programs,” Byars stressed. “That FICA deduction that pays for Medicare that comes out of our checks every two weeks? We will no longer benefit from it.”
Exhaustive reporting done just over the last three years alone, has clearly demonstrated how bad profit-driven “Medicare Dis-Advantage” plans are for retirees—regardless of how many seniors across the nation are actually enrolled in one of the profit-driven plans.
This past summer, the Kaiser Family Foundation issued a report finding the number of prior authorization requests denied by Medicare Advantage grew between 2021 and 2022 from 5.8 to 7.4 percent. As Newsweek reported, “Altogether, 3.4 million prior authorization requests were denied.”
The New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees contending that Mayor Adams’ ongoing privatization scheme represents a diminishment of existing city health care benefits have won 10 times in court.
“Forgive me for saying this, but I'm gonna say it—you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that a private company, as opposed to a governmental organization, which is the better of the two, right? The better of the two, of course, would be a governmental agency,” Carrube added. “I do follow politics across—not only New York and New Jersey— but across the country as much as I possibly can. And I see where we're heading with all this. [City agencies and authorities] are trying to wash their hands, give it all to the private companies and let the private companies deal with the bullshit. They save a ton of money—and they wash their hands of it all.”
Byars is running to unseat Richard Davis as head of TWU Local 100 on a pro-Medicare, anti-Medicare Dis-Advantage platform. She’s also been actively championing fellow co-workers involved in what she describes as “heavy-handed” disciplinary proceeding. But she’s also fighting an MTA suspension stemming from an incident that occurred last summer when the subway train she was operating at the time reportedly rolled backwards.
“It’s all retaliation,” Byars told Work-Bites in Brooklyn. “The MTA and the union together are colluding due to the fact that this is an election. We're in the midst of an election year—and I'm a dissident.”
TWU Local 100 President Richard Davis’ decision to give up Medicare and push retired transit workers in his union into a profit-driven Medicare Plan from Aetna is reportedly saving MTA bosses $73 million in healthcare costs.
“I'm at the table now [with the MTA] and I'm asking if they lose this—how are you getting this money back? And they don't have an answer,” Carrube added. “It's a dangerous, dangerous road that these unions are taking.”
Evangeline Byars [center, black jacket and cap] stands with fellow active TWU Local 100 workers and retirees outside 180 Livingston Street.
Carrube’s union is at the bargaining table with the MTA right now in search of a new three-year deal. SSSA’s settled its last contract prior to TWU Local 100 giving up its Medicare coverage and pushing members into Medicare Advantage. That SSSA pact, according to Carrube, included the addition of a spousal death benefit for union members. Giving up Medicare wasn’t even on the table.
“Then TWU Local 100 went in and did their thing,” Carrube told Work-Bites. “Now, this contract they’re trying to take it back from me with this Medicare Advantage, and I’m just not even discussing it with them. It’s a no go for me—you ain't getting it back. It's done. That's something that's not going to happen.”
Work-Bites has made repeated attempts to contact TWU Local 100 for comment on this particular story, as well as the Medicare Advantage fight overall. All of our calls and emails, however, have gone unanswered.
You gotta wonder why.
In recent weeks, Davis has grown increasingly defensive and agitated in public when asked about his decision to push TWU Local 100 retirees into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan. In one particularly juvenile episode, he allegedly called New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees President Marianne Pizzitola “pizza-face.”
Retirees fighting back against the Medicare Advantage push have been joining together in solidarity and helping each other in their individual battles—not only here in NYC—but across the country. And that, indeed, appears to be something that irritates the hell out of pro-privatization forces.
This past week, Pizzitola uploaded a YouTube video to the NYCOPSR’s channel that included footage of Davis verbally abusing and shutting down TWU Local 100R President Lloyd Archer at a recent union meeting held at the Michael J. Quill Depot in Midtown.
“If Mr. Davis had nothing to hide this wouldn’t happen,” Pizzitola says on the video. “Clearly, Mr. Davis has something to hide because he doesn’t want it factchecked by Lloyd, TWU Local 100R, by us…or me, who he calls ‘Marianne pizza-face.’ Clearly, when he can’t attack the issues, he attacks the people.”
The retired first-responder and NYCOPSR head also implores TWU International President John Samuelsen in the same video to “make sure his union leaders act like union leaders—and not disgrace the name of Mike Quill or disrespect your retired unionists.”
Septuagenarian Michael A. Hall worked for the MTA as an Electronic Equipment Maintainer for nearly 30 years before retiring in 2011. He also stood outside 180 Livingston Street recently and told Work-Bites how lucky he is because he hasn’t had to try and use the Medicare Advantage health insurance plan TWU Local 100 and Davis put him in this year.
“I really haven’t been sick and haven’t used it yet,” Hall said. “I’m 75-years-old—I’m hanging in there. I hope to be 175-years-old! I never thought something like this [Medicare Advantage switcheroo] would happen, but it’s happening.”