Listen: Mayoral Candidates Pledge Support for NYC Retirees

NYCOPSR President Marianne Pizzitola [c] with mayoral candidates at the CUNY Graduate Center.

By Bob Hennelly

On Thursday, April 18, the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees held their much-anticipated Mayoral debate at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan. 

Attendees included Senator Jessica Ramos, former City Comptroller Scott Stringer, current City Comptroller Brad Lander, attorney Jim Walden, former Assemblyman Michael Blake, activist and talk show host Curtis Sliwa, and political newcomer Whitney Tilson.

Former Governor Andrew Cuomo did not attend, but did send a letter supporting the retirees platform which includes maintaining their unfettered access to Traditional Medicare.

Mayor Eric Adams, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, and Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani were also MIA. 

On this episode of What’s Going On? Marianne Pizzitola, head of the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees, and I are joined by Work-Bites editor Joe Maniscalco and Michelle Keller, a retiree from DC 37 Local 375 who serves on the board of the New York City organization of Public Service Retirees and has been so involved with the New York City Coalition of Labor Union Women. 

Twenty minutes in, the panel is joined by Scott Cohen, a retired police medic and spokesman for the Nassau Retirees Legal Fund which represents some 1,250 members with the CSEA—Civil Service Employees Association. Cohen describes his group's battle to protect members’ healthcare benefits they earned while on active duty.

The privatization of Medicare by shifting the nation's retired population into predatory Medicare Advantage is called for in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. Here in New York City, the shift has been advanced by the Municipal Labor Committee as well as AFSCME's District Council 37 under the leadership of Henry Garrido.

In 2022, the New York Times and Kaiser Health News published extensive investigative pieces which raised alarming questions about the nation’s largest Medicare Advantage insurers including Aetna. The news outlets confirmed that the insurers were on the radar of regulators who had documented a sector-wide practice of so-called “up-coding” when insurers would say patients were sicker than they actually were to secure a higher reimbursement from the government while using prior authorizations, as well as outright denials of care, to reduce their costs.

As part of the Trump/Musk junta's support of privatization, they recently increased the benchmark payments to the predatory plans by over 5 percent—or $25 billion dollars. 

Representatives Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), Rosa DeLauro (CT-03), and Jan Schakowsky (IL-09) are leading a group of lawmakers calling on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to enact urgent reforms to Medicare Advantage (MA) plans. The members maintain that unlike Traditional Medicare, MA plans are administered by private insurers and have been documented to be fraught with waste, fraud, and abuse—often sacrificing patient outcomes for higher corporate profit. 

“Corporate health insurers offering MA plans are harming vulnerable patients across the country and endangering the solvency of the Medicare Trust Funds,”  the Members said in a statement. “Supporters of MA claim the program reduces costs. Unfortunately, the MA program has never saved the government money. Other recent data has shown that the bottom 5 percent of MA plans are responsible for 10,000 preventable deaths every year.”

Listen to the entire show below: