On June 8th we learned that the Comptroller declined to register the Aetna contract, something that UFT brass claimed a few days ago is not actually needed. Huh? They read the Comptroller’s objection as more of a stance.
Could the Comptroller stop the city from moving forward with this plan?
According to the Daily News: No, he can’t, because the Mayor can override it, which he did last Thursday, the 15th:
Mayor Adams used executive authority Thursday to enact his controversial Medicare Advantage Plan for the city’s retired municipal workforce — overruling Comptroller Brad Lander, who has refused to sign off on the private health insurance switchover.
Last week, Lander announced he had invoked a rare comptroller authority to block Adam’s contract to shift the city’s roughly 250,000 retired workers into an Advantage plan administered by private health insurance giant Aetna.
This is the kind of exact information I would have preferred at the retiree meeting. Instead we got spin.
Within the past couple of days we found out that the city has delayed the opt-out time for the new plan from June 30th to July 10th, and as usual we’ve not been told why. Even if they did give an excuse, I’m not sure I would believe them.
After all, there is that rally Thursday to support the introduction of legislation requiring the city to offer a Medigap plan, not to mention that at last week’s UFT meeting we learned that not all the members had received a welcome package regarding the new plan. That kind of sloppiness has happened before. Heck, it’s even happened when they send out ballots that somehow don’t arrive in my mailbox.
A lot of people are still opposed to Advantage plans. Joe Maniscalco’s article in Work-bite cites quite a few comments about the city’s full-throttle support of this Aetna Advantage plan, and I’m in total agreement with all the bits in bold:
Jeff Johnson, former head of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO and co-president of the Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action [PSARA], tells Work-Bites Medicare Advantage programs and ACO REACH plans allow corporate America to “fleece the Medicare system by taking excessive administrative costs and profits from what would otherwise be money available for expanded services for Medicare beneficiaries and for lowering Medigap premium costs.”We’re in a wait-and-see moment, whether the UFT can pull it off this time round.
Stu Eber, president of the Council of Municipal Retiree Organizations [COMRO], says . . . “Our tax dollars should not be going to a company that is under multiple investigations for fraudulent practices.”
UFT retiree and CROC member Martha Bordman calls Medicare Advantage an “insurance racket,” and says it’s “heartening to hear the comptroller recognizes this, and is showing integrity by not rubber-stamping the Aetna MA contract.”
As for myself, have been in the HIP VIP HMO for years. No problems, so why rock the boat when we’re not sure if this new thing will fly.
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