But, most everyone I know who’s in Senior Care takes the rider. It’s the same as a premium, except we get reimbursed for a lot of it through the “City Optional Rider Reimbursement Benefit.”
A question recently came up about whether the rider in the proposed Aetna PPO arrangement is also “optional.” Would you be required to take the SilverScript plan for meds if you moved into the new PPO?
I tried to answer this on my own from the OLR materials, from which this screenshot has been taken of the top of the p. 9 in the FAQ brochure:
The last paragraph above says two things. First, that once you allow yourself to be moved into the Aetna PPO, you’ll be automatically disenrolled from any stand-alone drug plan you may have, and secondly, that you’ll “need” to get drug coverage through your union or through a drug rider.
What’s not particularly clear is the difference between obtaining coverage through “your union” or “by purchasing the prescription drug rider.” Do some of the city unions offer a drug plan directly and others through a welfare fund? This article says that “many” of the city unions established welfare funds for drugs and other benefits, which implies that not all of them do. Certainly the big ones like ours have welfare funds. Is it saying that the unions who don’t have welfare funds offer drug coverage in some other way?
Also not clear is the phrase “You will need to obtain ... coverage.” Does that mean if you want drug coverage at all, you’ll have to get it in one of the ways mentioned, or can you in fact choose not to get a drug plan at all? It probably means the former, that the rider is no longer optional: if you take the Aetna PPO, the drug coverage comes with it and the cost will be $103.50/month. If the latter, it means the rider is still optional, in that you could sign up for the PPO but choose not to have any drug coverage at all.
(Parenthetically, if you don’t have creditable Part D coverage for two months, Social Security will slap you with a penalty once you rejoin the Part D system, but some people do make that choice. For example, they may get their drugs from abroad, or from a spouse's plan, or feel so healthy they’ll take their chance for a year. Admittedly those cases are rare.)
I decided to make some calls to see if someone could clarify these points. Starting with the Aetna hotline, the rep told me that since the plan is now on hold, they were not able to advise us properly. They might renegotiate certain items. The bosses had, in fact, removed some of the notes the staff had been relying on to clarify what was in the manuals. The rep did end up writing a ticket for her superiors to check out the wording on p. 9 of the manual and tighten it up.
That got nowhere, so I called the UFT Welfare Fund. The first rep couldn’t help, but she passed me over to someone who was more specialized in the medical questions. From that person I got three definitive statements, the main one being: “There is no Aetna plan.” There was no point in clarifying anything about the new PPO because it does not exist at this time and she could only really answer questions about our current health care.
She then confirmed that the current rider is indeed optional for Senior Care people, that you could go in the open market and buy a stand-alone plan if you wanted to.
And after I posed the hypothetical question that if the Aetna deal were to go through and you allowed yourself to be enrolled in it, would you be required to get the rider?
Her answer: Yes, you’d have to take the rider, it would not be optional.
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