By Joe Maniscalco

You know your for-profit, privatized Medicare Advantage health insurance plan really sucks when right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats actually unite to defeat its imposition on municipal retirees.   

But that’s exactly what’s going on in New York City right now, where members of the City Council’s Common-Sense and Progressive caucuses are joining forces to oppose the new bill aimed at changing a section of the Administrative Code protecting municipal retirees and their traditional Medicare health insurance coverage.

“This is a bipartisan issue,” New York City Council Member Chi Ossé declared just prior to the start of a hearing on the bill at City Hall on Jan 9. “We as workers of the city that represents retirees know that this is a cruel act.”

Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Shahana Hanif [D-39th District] was right there to back up her left-leaning colleague’s sentiments, denouncing Democratic Mayor Eric Adams and his administration’s “callous attempt to strip existing healthcare coverage from thousands of our retirees.”

But Council Members Joann Ariola [R-32nd District], David Carr [R-50th District] and Vickie Paladino [R-19th District] — all members of the Republican Common-Sense Caucus — were right there, too.

Ariola even brought a hand-truck loaded up with boxes of printed emails from thousands of constituents urging City Council members to vote no on amending Administrative Code 12-126, and allowing Mayor Eric Adams and the leaders of the Municipal Labor Committee — Michael Mulgrew, Henry Garrido and Harry Nespoli [MLC] — to usher in a Medicare Advantage plan.

“I have been at the forefront and leading this march to support our retirees, and will not let go, I will not let up,” Ariola said. “Our retirees deserve the retirement benefits and healthcare benefits that they were promised and it is our job as their elected officials to make sure that remains intact.”

Carr praised municipal retirees for their “decades-long careers of public service as city workers” and said they “deserve every penny that they get in healthcare coverage.”

“They already have to pay thousands of dollars per year in co-pays,” the Staten Island legislator said. “Many of them are on fixed incomes; they cannot afford to pay more in premiums per year, per month, per person. It’ll simply break the bank.”

Paladino said the Common-Sense Caucus stands in “total unity with our retirees” and that she, too, has received thousands of emails from constituents “begging us to keep their healthcare intact.”

“They gave all — thirty years, forty years — they lived through the best of times and worst of times,” she said. “These are our senior citizens; the most vulnerable of our population — do not mess around with their healthcare. They worked too hard and too long. Leave them alone.”

New York City Municipal retirees would have already been pushed into a Medicare Advantage health insurance plan long ago had they not organized — as the experienced and battle-hardened trade unionists they are — into several groups and fought back both in the courts and on the streets against the city’s plans.

Marianne Pizzitola is head of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees.

“We know that the City Council is under pressure and they’re being lied to and fed propaganda by the city, OMB, OLR — and, unfortunately, our former unions — to use the value of our healthcare to collectively bargain their raises today,” she said.

Pizzitola referenced “everything that is going on around the country where people are being told about the disadvantages of Medicare Advantage — all of the reports from the Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General where they say they’ve delayed and denied care wrongfully through prior authorizations.”

“Where the unions today don’t seem to think that will be a problem for this population — and that is an issue — being able to put that type of burden on someone to have to absorb when we’re in our 70’s, 80s, 90s or disabled — is completely abhorrent,” Pizzitola said.

Work-Bites already reported that when municipal retirees in Delaware challenged that state’s campaign to push them into a Medicare Advantage plan, they discovered the scheme contained some 2,030 pre-authorizations.

“That should not be something that is put on [retirees],” Pizzitola said. “We earned our rights. We earned our benefits, we paid for them. We gave up years of wages. We gave up benefits to have what we have in retirement in the form of deferred compensation. These people shouldn’t have to worry in retirement, to literally organize and come out and defend themselves.”

What’s really helping to drive the city’s push for Medicare Advantage, according to Pizzitola, is federal money.

“We know they are trying to privatize our Medicare by putting us into Medicare Advantage plans because of the federal subsidies,” she said. “The city told the MLC that if they put retirees into this privatized Medicare Advantage plan, they would take the value of our plans and apply it toward their stabilization fund or for their collective bargaining. Retirees should not be sold off like cattle.”

Sarah Shapiro, a retired UFT teacher and organizer with the Cross-Union Retirees Organizing Committee, later thanked god for “the real progressives” and “the republicans who are not afraid to come out strongly for not going back on promises made to all municipal retirees.”