The Council of Municipal Retiree Organizations (COMRO) has learned that you are in the process of awarding a highly
lucrative contract to a major health insurance company to take over administering health insurance for over 200,000 Medicare-eligible retirees effective this July 1. You released an RFP and have eliminated two of the four responders. Your technical committee is evaluating the two finalists and will shortly send their recommendations to you for a final vote.
Nowhere in this process have you consulted with the 200,000 people and their families to determine how it will help or harm us. Medicare Part B works very well for most of us. We contributed to Medicare during our years of employment with the tacit understanding that we will have the hard-earned entitlement when we turned 65. Now we are dependent on the kindness of strangers to maintain our health and wellbeing without additional cost. We are duly concerned that these types of managed care programs have a history of making it difficult to choose doctors and specialists by introducing bureaucratic hurdles.
The lack of transparency in your rush to change this program is both insulting and frightening to those of us who have collectively worked millions of years serving the people of New York City. How can we trust our very health to a backroom deal based on a dubious assumption of cost avoidance?
Before this contract is awarded, you must include actual Part B recipients in the evaluation process to ensure any change in Medicare Part B will not harm us.
10 thoughts on “An Open Letter to Mayor de Blasio and the Municipal Labor Committee:”
A petition with Stu Eber’s comment as text to all city retirees. Sign me first.
Here’s a link to the petition. Thanks!
https://nycmea.org/retirees/
I am vehemently opposed to getting rid of Medicare part B. Our medical coverage is excellent now. I want to be able to choose my own doctors and hospital if need be. Perhaps it should be called Medicare Disadvantage!
Thank you for the Open Letter to DeBlasio and the Municipal Labor Committee regarding the secret negotiations
they are holding to sell out the City’s retirees by switching them from the Medicate they have paid for and earned to the profit-mongers calling themselves deceptively Medicare Advantage.
When are these scoundrels meeting and where?
Can you find this out and let us know?
They need to have some company!!!
The Municipal Labor Committee’s office is Room 540 at 125 Barclay Place. During COVID their meetings are virtual.
If you are an NYC retiree, contact your former union’s president/executive director and express your disapproval. If you are a member of that union’s retiree chapter, include that chapter president.
Also why was nyc housing authority offered any part in the early retirement .
Because NYCHA is not a Mayoral agency but a creation of the state legislature, de Blasio did not have the authority to request approval from the state legislature.
NYCHA is not a NYC Mayoral agency. The Mayor can only request state approval for NYC Mayoral agencies. The Governor did not request ERI for any state or county agencies or authorities.
Thank you. Send. Send!
Dear Mr. Eber,
In our present situation, does it make more sense to opt out and keep our Senior Care program as is?
I believe it will cost about $400 a month for a couple. I am already paying $300, so I am consdering the extra $100 plus co pays.
Or should we try the new plan for a year and then opt out if we don’t like it?
I appreciate your participation in this matter. I was a colleague of Carol.
Yours truly,
Paula Landau