Mulgrew: the Comptroller is worried about MAP. Why aren’t you?
Today, Comptroller Brad Lander declined to register the Aetna MAP plan for New York City municipal retirees, citing not just pending litigation, but also concerns over the ethics of reverting to Medicare Advantage in the first place. Specifically, he noted “the broader Medicare Advantage trends are worrisome. Recent investigations identified extensive allegations of fraud, abuse, overbilling, and denials of medically necessary care at 9 of the top 10 Medicare Advantage plans, including CVS Health, which owns Aetna.” These arguments are familiar to New Action members and others in the opposition – we’ve been making them for over a year now. Nevertheless, despite some support from legislative politicians, especially over 12-126, this may be the first major instance of a top executive player putting a halt to MAP.
Is this a sign of a turning tide, inspiring hope for members of later pension tiers who fear retiring long after future iterations of watered down MAP contracts gut our health plans? I’d like to hope so.
Yes, Mayor Adams may reverse Lander’s decision. But we now have well positioned allies refusing to sign off on retiree healthcare cuts. And that bodes well for the future, even if it does mean our dear beloved Unity-led UFT leaders may need to find their ‘healthcare savings’ elsewhere, as their debt to the City passes its due date. And yes, with the spotlight on retirees, we should expect those cuts to land on in-service teachers, who have been promised the absurd: an ‘equal or better replacement to GHI at 10% cheaper of a cost.’
When will that replacement be announced? You better bet it won’t be until after Mulgrew tries to ram through a mediocre contract—and that process will start as early as next week. So, before we vote on a TA, let’s make sure we ask – what will only 90% of our current health plan look like, and how will we afford it on a pay-cut?
Make no mistake: we can’t win the battle against healthcare cuts solely on the good graces of well-positioned politicians. Ultimately, we need to situate ourselves to be able to stop anti-labor backroom deals. As Mulgrew is keen to remind us at DAs and executive board meetings, health care is a part of our overall compensation. Well, we vote on whether to accept what the City offers us in economic compensation. So, both now and when we’re retired, we deserve a vote on changes to medical coverage too. Since UFT leadership doesn’t see the problems everyone else sees with reducing our coverage and tossing retirees onto MAP, we need a formal and permanent mechanism to keep them from doing so.
7 Comments
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BaconUFT
Yes, one of the things that has a lot of members rightly worried is moving from a non-profit (GHI) to a for-profit insurer. 10% ‘savings’ in a for-profit context could actually feel like the equivalent of ‘30%’ savings in a nonprofit context like GHI. The profit motive will eat up much more of the cost.
MAP is an insult to retirees who worked their entire working lives with the promise that they’d retire with quality traditional Medicare. And it adds insult to injury that many now are not in a position to deal with the red tape that Adams and Mulgrew are throwing at them in order to save a few bucks for short term gain. For people like me who have a long way to go before retirement, it also begs the question, how bad will our health plan be 30 years from today? 40? 50? Because MAP contracts expire, and I have to imagine each new one would be a reduction in benefits from the last.
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Mike D.
This is a symbolic win but a win none the less and is great news for us as this debacle continues to play out. What I find so crazy is that Mulgrew is trying to tell us that he knows more about how to use City money than a friggin’ comptroller.
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BaconUFT
Mulgrew’s line has always been ‘our MAP plan is better.’ Nonsense, especially as they constantly expire and need to be renegotiated. Once the first deal is done, they’ll deteriorate in perpetuity.
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Shelley
What happened to the signature campaign? We were to have a vote once we had the signatures.
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BaconUFT
20,000 signatures is a lot, but we’re about halfway there.
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Anonymous
What our members really need to do is try to educate themselves on health insurance. While the city tries to negotiate new plans, we have to make sure that our doctors and other providers are not only participating providers but also “in-network.” I have seen a lot of conversation on the teacher FB group and there is a lot of misconceptions about doctors being participating providers versus in-network. Our members are then shocked when they get a bill in the mail asking for the difference of the costs of their visits. While our current GHI/Emblem health plan has its flaws (as does all insurance companies), my personal experience of doing medical billing on the side has shown that Aetna is worse. They deny claims and procedures which then the doctors can pass along the costs to patients.
The new MAP is not necessarily covering all of the costs to our retiree’s. I don’t fully know what the MAP is covering but I have seen that many NYC workers have this as their secondary insurance with Medicare as their primary and visits are not being covered at all. It is unfair to ask our retiree’s who have probably been with their same physicians for years to now move to another provider just because the new MAP does not cover or pay that doctor. The city and UFT need to think about that instead of just going for the cheaper way out on insurance.