LISTEN: NYC Retirees React to Latest Victory; What’s Happening in Ohio?

New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees President Marianne Pizzitola at a rally outside City Hall on June 22. Photo by Joe Maniscalco

This past Friday, New York State Supreme Court Judge Lyle E. Frank issued a decision permanently prohibiting New York City Mayor Eric Adams from forcing 250,000 retired municipal workers, most of them former union members, out of traditional Medicare and into a profit-driven Aetna Medicare Advantage Plan.

This was a major victory for the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees, and adds tremendous momentum to the growing national movement to rolling back the role of Wall Street and the 21st century robber barons in our ailing healthcare system. 

Of course, the Adams administration says it is appealing the case. 

We speak with retired FDNY EMT Marianne Pizzitola, president of the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees, about what’s next in the battle for retirees to hold on to their traditional Medicare health insurance. 

Marianne is joined by Rose Roach, the National Coordinator for the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, who just recently retired as the executive director of the Minnesota Nurses Association. For over two decades, Rose has been at the forefront of the movement for universal healthcare, arguably the single-most important labor issue of our time.

In Part II of the show, we head out to Ohio to visit with Tim Burga, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, which played a vital role in organizing last week’s resounding defeat of a ballot question put forward by that state’s Republican Party to make it harder for voters to amend that state’s constitution. All of that coming before this fall’s referendum on enshrining female reproductive rights into the Ohio state constitution. Over three million voters turned out in the middle of summer and overwhelmingly rejected the state GOP’s anti-democratic ploy. We’ll ask Tim about how Ohio unions got voters to turn out, and what last week’s results might mean for 2024.

Listen to the entire show below: