Demonstrators protested against the mayor’s plan to shift public-sector retirees to Medicare Advantage on Thursday, March 9, 2023.
File photo By Dean Moses
Mayor Zohran Mamdani may be the most visible face of city government, but even he will tell you that the real work in keeping New York moving is done by the army of municipal workers in the numerous agencies and departments at the heart of city government.
Through the generations, hundreds of thousands of public servants have spent the best years of their lives delivering for New York — whether on the beat as a cop, on the job as a firefighter, picking up trash for the Sanitation Department, pruning trees for the Parks Department, assisting seniors at the Department for the Aging, and so on.
The city’s municipal workers have some of the best benefits any civil servant in the United States can enjoy. Yet in recent years, City Hall has pushed to privatize part of municipal retirees’ health benefits, shifting them to Medicare Advantage plans in a cost-cutting move.
The real costs, however, are being borne by municipal retirees who have to shell out more of their hard-earned savings and fixed incomes just to afford full health coverage in their golden years. It is hardly what they signed up for when they chose to join the municipal workforce.
Medicare is affordable, transparent, and run by the federal government at minimal overhead. Medicare Advantage is neither affordable nor transparent. Private for-profit companies exploit the rules and the system to gain as much as possible from their customers while minimizing expenses through claim denials.
Federal investigators have found that the firms running Medicare Advantage have improperly denied necessary medical care to millions of Americans each year. In other cases, as the New York Times found, firms are “upcoding” cases to gain the most payments from the federal government.
The city’s current plan to shift more retirees’ health benefits to Medicare Advantage only enriches bad-faith private companies. It is antithetical to the pro-labor, inclusive environment that Mayor Mamdani is seeking to establish at City Hall.
The new mayor has a golden opportunity to prove he is a mayor for all New Yorkers by protecting the medical benefits of the army of retired municipal employees and ensuring that, in their golden years, they will never be denied the services and procedures they need to ensure their health and a high standard of living.
We urge Mayor Mamdani to move the city’s health benefits away from the Medicare Advantage program, which too often takes advantage of beneficiaries. There are better ways to cut costs without throwing municipal workers under the bus.
