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By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Eric Adams may believe the highest court in the state will still let him push 250,000 municipal retirees into a profit-driven Aetna Medicare Advantage health insurance plan if he asks the judges nicely, but City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams says it’s time for “closure.”

“We are reviewing the Court’s decision and understand the Administration plans to appeal this latest ruling,” a City Council spokesperson tells Work-Bites. “This has been a prolonged process in the courts and what the City needs is closure on this issue that addresses the concerns of all parties.”

The Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court on Tuesday, May 21, dealt Adams and his Medicare Advantage allies in the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] their latest legal defeat when it upheld an earlier ruling by Supreme Court Justice Lyle Frank permanently blocking the privatization plan from happening.

“We have respectfully asked her to be involved for two years,” retired EMT and New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees President Marianne Pizzitola says. “Sadly, a City Council of another generation stood up for city retirees and codified the protections we earned over the years of our faithful service. Instead, we had to turn to the courts at great expense to enforce that social contract.”

Speaker Adams has actively worked to block City Council legislation aimed at protecting the existing health insurance benefits all New York City municipal retirees have enjoyed for the past 57 years. Unsurprisingly, talk now about “closure” and “addressing the concerns of all parties” has immediately put battle-hardened municipal retirees on red alert.

“We are not going to negotiate away this victory,” Pizzitola says. “This win has national significance because it helps counter the shift to predatory Medicare Advantage, a national scandal that’s cost taxpayers tens of billions and thousands of elderly Americans a premature death due to the denials and prior authorizations.”

Earlier this month, the heads of CVS/Aetna talked about further increasing those denials and prior authorizations—along with shrinking provider networks, jacking up premiums and reducing benefits—in response to rising health care claims and intolerable costs.

All of which, according to Medicare Advantage watchdog Wendall Potter, should concern privatization zealots like Mayor Eric Adams.

“Despite ongoing protests from thousands of city retirees, [Mayor] Adams has pressed ahead with the forced migration of retirees to Aetna’s club. He and the city’s taxpayers will find out soon that Aetna will insist on renegotiating the deal,” Potter wrote in his May 16, blog post.

Mayor Adams inked a five-year Medicare Advantage contract with Aetna last year, which New York City Comptroller Brad Lander later refused to register.

“Why would we retirees sit down to negotiate with the City at this point?” retired school teacher and Cross-Union Retirees Organizing Committee [CROC] member Sarah Shapiro says. “The courts have already ruled in our favor that the city must provide us with the benefits we have always had: Our public Medicare, plus our supplemental plan. I for one, would like to know how much [money] the city has wasted in NYC tax dollars to keep fighting the retirees in this city. It’s shameful.”

City Council Member Vicki Paladino [R-19th District] says the courts have repeatedly spoken on the Medicare Advantage issue—and as for as she’s concerned—the issue has been settled.

“Contracts must be respected, it’s as simple as that,” she says. “Workers have built their lives around these healthcare benefits, and the city’s attempt to pull the rug out from under them was not only cruel, but unlawful. The administration is best advised at this point to move past this defeat, give up on any appeals, and now focus on making good on the promises we made to our workers.”

Retirees have long maintained that there are plenty of good alternatives to privatizing retiree health care. Moving to a self-managed public insurance system is just one of them. 

“The reason why health care costs are so high, is the profit system that rules in this city and in this country,” CROC member Martha Cameron says. “We need to consider other options. The only one [the Adams administration] settled on was screwing the retirees.”

Fellow CROC member Jim Perlstein says this week’s Appellate Division ruling in favor of retirees ought to be all the “closure” Speaker Adams needs.

“The OLR/MLC plan for retiree health care coverage is unjust and illegal,” he says. “In another sense, it’s long past time for all stakeholders, retirees included, to devise a comprehensive restructuring of NYC’s administration of health care coverage, one that treats such coverage as a public good and not as a commodity purchased at the patient’s expense. And all active and retired public employees should get to review such a plan and vote it up or down.”

Work-Bites also reached out to Civil Service and Labor Committee Chair Carmen De La Rosa and is awaiting a response.