By Joe Maniscalco

New York City municipal retirees urging Mayor Eric Adams to amend the health insurance contract he just signed with Aetna to include an option for traditional Medicare want Hizzoner to know they’re just as “strong and determined” as millions of French people in the streets protesting President Emmanuel Macron’s grossly undemocratic bid to raise France’s retirement age to 64.

“Just like them we will not give up until we have the healthcare we were promised,” retired CUNY Professor Cecilia McCall told the hundreds of municipal retirees rallying outside City Hall on Friday, March 31.

The city retirees, some of them well into their 80’s, collected roughly three-thousand letters enumerating their demands and would not leave the City Hall gates until someone from the Mayor’s Office came down to collect them.

“The city has reneged on the contract it had with us when we were active workers,” McCall continued. “The bargain was sacrifice wages now, but when you retire and you need it most, you will have publicly funded premium-free quality healthcare. Yesterday, with one stroke of his pen — and no doubt to pre-empt this rally — the mayor broke that contract with us and instead signed a contract with Aetna — a private for-profit health insurance company under investigation for fraud, and whose loyalty is not to its clients, but to its shareholders.”

Work-Bites reached out to the Mayor’s Office for comment on this story but was unsuccessful.

‘A Backdoor Deal to Get Rid of Medicare Altogether’

Municipal retirees have managed to beat back efforts to strip city workers of their traditional Medicare health benefits this long through the use of time-honored trade unionist tactics that include court cases, legislative appeals, and spirited street actions. The significance of the last of these — given that what’s happening in NYC is part of a larger nationwide effort to privatize traditional Medicare — cannot be understated.

“I think that people need to really rise up and get into the streets, we need to legislate, we need to litigate, and we need to organize and build a movement because it's not just New York City retirees who are being hit,” retiree Martha Cameron told Work-Bites this week. “All over this country we have a devastating healthcare system that is falling apart, that is leaving people in the streets, and leaving them in hideous debt, and leaving them sick and dying. We cannot go on like this.”

Neal Frumkin, DC 37 Retirees Association Vice-President of Inter-Union Relations, called the nationwide drive to push retirees into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage program a “backdoor deal to get rid of Medicare altogether.”

“There are forces in this country that never wanted Medicare to exist,” Frumkin told Work-Bites. “Being out in the street gives people the sense that they have the power. We’re not looking for somebody to be our papa or to be our mama. We had those — mine are dead,” he added. “We want to show that we can fight, and we have our own voices, and we need to be heard.”

CROC — the Cross-union Retirees Organizing Committee — began launching street actions in New York City two years ago, in direct response to efforts by the Adams administration and the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] to strip retirees of their traditional Medicare health benefits and usher them into Medicare Advantage. 

“It has made a difference,” CROC organizer Gloria Brandman told Work-Bites. “It's advertised this issue to a lot more people than would have known about it. It’s encouraged people to join up with the lawsuit group. I think that's really important." 

Brandman also said there are still a lot of retirees across the country who “might not even know what is happening.”

“And so, one day they're gonna wake up, they're gonna go to the doctor, and they're gonna find out: 'Oh, you can't come to see me because we're not in this Advantage plan.’ And they wouldn't have even known that it was happening to them,” she said.

“This Capitalist System is Killing Us”

Jen Gaboury, a PSC-CUNY Chapter Chair and active lecturer at Hunter College in New York City, called out privatizing retiree healthcare as outright “theft” and a violation of a sacred trust between the city and its municipal workers.

“I am here to call out to my other active workers — it is time for us to organize alongside our union siblings the retirees to protect them. But to also protect our own healthcare,” Gaboury said. “If you think the city is going to try to amend the [Administrative] Code to save money, but will not come to us next — that seems foolish.”

The Adams administration and the heads of the MLC — the organization representing public sector unions in NYC — had previously attempted to get the New York City Council to scrap Administrative Code 12-126 codifying healthcare benefits for municipal workers.

“Ultimately,” Gaboury added, “it’s going to be about a real cure.”

“We need to regulate hospital pricing,” she said. “We need to bargain on drugs. We need to stop pretending that privatizing care and cutting benefits is the solution — because it’s not. And Labor unions need to get their heads in the game.”

New York City Council Member Alexa Avilés [D-District 38] urged retirees rallying outside City Hall to continue to being “bold” and to continue to demand elected representatives “choose people over profit.”

“We live in a capitalist system that puts our bodies as profit,” she said. “Health should not be profit. Our bodies should not be profit. I hope we stand together and we dismantle this capitalist system that is killing us.”

Council Member Christopher Marte charged Mayor Adams with “turning his back on the people that sacrifice everything” on behalf of all New Yorkers and caring “more about the executives and shareholders of Aetna.”

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, meanwhile, urged Mayor Adams to “come back to the table.”

“This is a very bad precedent that we’re setting,” he said. “Bottom line: any plan that is done on the backs of retirees is just not a plan we can accept.”

Nearly 90-year-old Evelyn Jones Rich called the $600 million the Adams administration and the heads of the MLC insist will be saved by pushing retirees into a federally subsidized for-profit Medicare Advantage program — a “mirage.”

“The data show that the feds every year, replace a smaller amount, so that 2023 will bring two percent of this $600 million that the city tells us it's going to save,” she said.  “I am not giving up and neither should you.”

McCall told rally-goers what they already knew: “Aetna will make profits by denying and delaying care.”

“I don’t want life and death decisions about me made by an algorithm,” she said. “I want decisions about my health to be me and my physicians — not me, my physician and a third party. It’s still within the power of the mayor to allow us to have premium-free Medicare. Option C is Medicare with premium free SeniorCare. It maintains our access to the care we currently receive, deserve and worked for. The city would not be saving as much money, but it would be saving us from the uncertainty of inferior care. Let’s keep after him and demand he amend the agreement to include Option C. We will not stop until we have that choice.”