‘Council Members Gotta Stand Up [and] Have Some Spine,’ Intro. 1099 Sponsor Says

NYC Council Member Charles Barron: Capitalism is in crisis - that’s why they want to privatize everything. Photo by Joe Maniscalco

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City municipal retirees have spent nearly three years battling the most powerful public sector union heads in the city and now two separate mayoral administrations who together have shown themselves to be hellbent on tearing apart what a “good city job” used to mean in this town.

Like you, that all sounds absolutely crazy to City Council Member Charles Barron [D-42nd District], too.

“I think it’s capitalism gone mad,” the outgoing Brooklyn legislator tells Work-Bites. “I think the leadership and labor should be ashamed of themselves.”

Healthcare, any city worker will also tell you, has long been the proverbial “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow” and a major reason why they signed up for civil service in the first place. Now, however, the forces of healthcare privatization are acting as if they are oblivious to this fundamental reality and perfectly fine, too, with subjecting aging municipal retirees to Medicare Advantage’s well-documented M.O. of fraud, delays, and outright denials of care.

As Council Member Barron points out, they also think nothing of pitting active workers against retirees in a craven effort to win support for Medicare Advantage.

“Henry [Garrido], Michael [Mulgrew], and the union leadership misinforming the rank and file…I think, eventually, the rank and file is going to wake up and smell the coffee,” the Brooklyn legislator says. “They're going to see that they've been betrayed, that they've been lied to — and I think they will rise up and not do what their leadership is telling them to do.”

Forget the municipal retirees in question are the very people who have sacrificed the most,  stewarding New Yorkers through some of the darkest decades the city has ever experienced — AIDS, crack, COVID, 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, the trials and tribulations are myriad — and it’s made many of them very sick. Who said, “Never Forget?” Retirees need their health care when they need it and not when some bureaucratic profiteer decides to parse it out to them.

Forget, too, that there are now more than 20,000 civil service vacancies in New York City and officials are scrambling to invent new ways to retain and attract talent. It sure is a good thing there are so many migrant families standing around lately for city government to blame all its problems on.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew, one-third of the ruling triumvirate in charge of New York City’s Municipal Labor Committee [MLC], which also includes DC37 Executive Director Henry Garrido and Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association President Harry Nespoli, continues to talk up a super-special Medicare Advantage plan they’ve concocted with Aetna saying there’s “nothing like it in the country.”

This incredible PR blitz is occurring at the precise moment an ever-increasing number of hospitals and healthcare systems nationwide are dropping the profit-driven health insurance plans like radioactive dog poop and running for the hills screaming.

Just a couple of days ago, Chris Van Gorder, president and CEO of the San Diego-based Scripps Health, told Becker’s, “If other organizations are experiencing what we are, it's going to be a short period of time before they start floundering or they get out of Medicare Advantage.”

“I think capitalism is in crisis so they want to privatize healthcare,” Council Member Barron says. "They want to privatize public housing, they want to privatize schools with charter schools — all because the corporate world wants to maximize profits. Which they did during COVID. Right here in New York, you have a surplus in this year’s budget of $4 billion — and $8 billion in a reserved budget — and you’re saying you don’t have the money to pay for the retirees that you’ve been paying for the last 57 years?”

New legislation codifying New York City’s decades-old promise to cover the 20-percent gap in health care costs originally built into traditional Medicare to make the business barons happy when it was created back in 1965, has been kicking around the New York City Council for at least the last year.

Meanwhile, no matter how many times Mayor Eric Adams and his administration have tried to push the Medicare Advantage contract he signed with Aetna back in March onto retirees in the name of savings — the courts keep telling them they can’t do it.

“Well, they may have a government shutdown…you got everybody crying like they ain't got no money — and the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer,” Council Member Barron says. “[Former Mayor Mike] Bloomberg was worth $5 Billion when I met him after he came in — now, he’s up to $20, $30, $40, $50, $60 billion.”

Hilarious. In fact, former Mayor Mike Moneybags has got a helluva lot more than that.

For a long while, we where all told Speaker Adrienne Adams and her colleagues needed more time to sift through and consider all the information coming at them about this thing called “Medicare Advantage” and what it was really all about.

It was if they didn’t enjoy the same access to all the exhaustive reporting and institutional investigations into the horrors of profit-driven Medicare Advantage plans that the rest of us had. It was also as if they didn’t know the fight New York City municipal retirees were fighting to retain their Medicare coverage is the same fight retirees in Delaware, Washington and other the parts of the country were fighting. Maybe they didn’t wanna know.

Then there were supposed “problems” with the legislation itself. Was it legal? Did it violate the Taylor Law? Would it stay fresh unrefrigerated? Would it make you talk funny after prolonged chewing?

Council Member Barron finally rescued the bill for retirees and introduced it in June. Intro. 1099 has just 17 sponsors and lots of associated reports swirling around it about other City Council members being warned against or blocked from cosponsoring it.

“The council members have gotta stand up — have some spine and say, ‘I hear you Speaker, but put my name down.’ Seventeen other people have signed on,” he says.

Sister legislation, concurrently introduced by Assembly Member Ken Zebrowski [D-96th District] is also making its way through the New York State Legislature and has more cosponsors. U.S. Representatives Ritchie Torres [NY-15] and Nicole Malliotakis [NY-11], also have their own bipartisan piece of legislation designed to protect traditional Medicare benefits from privatization at the federal level.

“I think the leadership in unions are going to have difficulties controlling the rank and file once we keep putting the truth out there about what's happening to them,” Council Member Barron says. “I see the real possibility of radical systemic change coming to union leadership — and coming into political leadership here in New York City, especially. And across the country.”

Although it presents to the wider world as a monolithic organization speaking with one thunderous voice, the mighty MLC actually consists of a lot of unhappy members frustrated with the dictatorial nature of the group and the power just three of the heads within it — Mulgrew, Garrido and Nespoli — have to lord over everybody else.

“The rank and file members are not stupid,” Council Member Barron says. “They know the real deal, and I think it’s going to be harder for union leadership to control them.”

Although his term ends in December, Council Member Barron says it’s a mistake to think it’ll be easier to squash Intro. 1099 with him out of the picture.

“I may not be in the Council, but I'm gonna be in their face,” the Brooklyn legislator tells Work-Bites. “I'm gonna be organizing — I'm gonna provide leadership on this issue in or out of the Council.”