It’s Your Public Duty, Brad: ‘Betrayed’ Union Retiree Urges NYC Comptroller Lander to Probe Medicare Advantage Contract with Aetna
“Our Lives Are Not For Profit”: NYC municipal retirees’ are seen here marching up Broadway during their latest mobilization against ongoing efforts to strip all civil service workers of their traditional Medicare benefits. Photo by Joe Maniscalco
Editor’s Note: Harry Weiner is lifelong New Yorker who devoted more than 30 years of his life working for the New York City Housing Authority. As as an IBT Local 237 member, Harry feels his union betrayed him when it voted in favor of stripping NYC municipal retirees of their traditional Medicare benefits and pushing them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan with Aetna.
This is his open letter to NYC Comptroller Brad Lander urging him to investigate the Municipal Labor Committee’s Medicare Advantage contract with Aetna.
Dear Brad Lander:
The comptroller’s office ensures that there is integrity, accountability, transparency and no abuses in city contracting. You have been prolific in conducting audits, issuing reports and analyses of city agencies. You have testified at numerous City Council hearings.
However, amid all the voices that have weighed in on the city’s plan to enroll retirees in a Medicare Advantage plan, you have been noticeably silent.
Audits of the Office of Labor Relations’ health benefits program for active employees and retirees are long overdue. In a May report, “Preparing for the Next Fiscal Storm,” you indicated that the Retiree Health Benefits Trust has improperly become “a rainy day fund because that is how it has been used in practice.”
Please audit where the money went!
You didn’t testify at the Committee on Civil Service and Labor’s Jan. 9 hearing on a proposed change to the administrative code that would have impacted health benefit expenditures. The procurement process conducted by OLR and the Municipal Labor Committee itself deserves scrutiny. Self serving letters and memos were made public. Meanwhile, the MLC and OLR will not disclose the names OR EVEN THE AFFILIATIONS of their Tripartite, Steering, Evaluation and Technical Committees.
So much for transparency.
In December, an “arbitrator” issued a paid opinion recommending Aetna to receive the contract. At the January hearing, Council members who asked to see a draft contract were rebuffed by OLR officials. No serious observer can say that the city was negotiating with Aetna from a position of strength. The fix was in.
Last week, the MLC voted to select Aetna. By Friday night, an announcement letter and a special Aetna website went live. But still no draft contract.
Please audit and investigate. It’s your public duty.