NY TIMES COVERS MEDICARE ADVANTAGE SWITCH; MARIANNE'S CURRENT MUST SEE VIDEOS

The NY Times has a long piece on Medicare Advantage. It is behind a paywall but you can view it here thanks to a gift article from someone. Norm also posted it at Norm's Notes. The Times article is well worth the read as it discusses privatization of Medicare (Medicare Advantage) both among public sector employees and those in the private sector. Michael Mulgrew and Marianne Pizzitola are quoted. 

Some highlights:

What’s more, when employers make this transition (to privatized Medicare Advantage), retirees often face a choice: Join an Advantage plan or lose the benefit.

“It really takes away choice,” said Marilyn Moon, an economist and a former trustee of both Social Security and Medicare. “The whole idea of Medicare Advantage was supposed to be to give people more choice, not less.”

In New York City, labor unions representing retirees have been working with the city on its planned shift to Advantage. They promoted the projected savings and their ability to use their bargaining clout to negotiate for far more generous features than those in plans available for individual purchase.

“When we looked at this, we saw that we could design our own plan that would get the same benefits and even more for our retirees,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city teachers’ union. “One of our greatest assets is the ability to use our buying power to get that done and, more importantly, to set up an accountability system and a contract where we’re holding the provider to every single word in our contract.”

As the plan was originally envisioned in 2018, retirees who wanted to stay on traditional Medicare could do so if they paid an estimated $191 per month to cover its higher cost to the city. But a grass-roots group founded in 2021, the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees, sued over the plan, taking its battle to the City Council and organizing through Facebook, YouTube and email.

The retiree group says it is considering its next steps, possibly including new litigation‌. “Labor should never support privatizing public health care or stripping retirees of vested earned benefits,” the group’s founder, Marianne Pizzitola, a retired city Fire Department Emergency Medical Services employee‌, said in a statement.

“This is a daily anxiety the city and the Municipal Labor Committee are putting us through,” she added in an interview.

For more insight on what the NYC Organization of Public Sector Retirees is doing to continue this battle, Marianne has put out plenty of videos:

I suggest these two as immediate views:

The first one is about Mulgrew planning to sell out retirees who are in other unions.

Mulgrew is negotiating for UFT retirees to have an exclusive option to purchase their own Medigap plan and stay in traditional Medicare because of the moratorium law (State law that says school districts can't diminish retiree health benefits unless they do the same for active employees).

The next video attacks Mulgrew and DC 37's Henry Garrido for privatizing Medicare. It also criticizes other municipal unions for not standing up to Mulgrew and Garrido but just caving in. 

Marianne says her organization will be filing litigation again to stop the privatization of Medicare for NYC retirees. Based on her organization's track record in court, I would say the battle to stop Mulgrewcare is not over by any means. For full disclosure, I have contributed money to the New York City Organization of Public Sector Retirees. I think you know where I stand on the issue.

Go here for the entire video page.