NYC union boss trashes ‘rump’ retirees anxious over less robust Medicare plan
The Big Apple’s top organized labor official recently trash-talked retired municipal workers anxious about the city’s effort to switch their Medicare coverage — just days after it emerged that the new plan may not allow them to seek care at a well-regarded Manhattan cancer hospital, the Daily News has learned.
The new Medicare Advantage Plus Plan has for months raised concerns from the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees, a group of ex-municipal workers who fear it could water down their health coverage. The group has been actively voicing their displeasure about the city telling retirees that they’ll have to pay a $191 monthly penalty if they choose to remain on their current Medicare coverage, instead of being automatically enrolled in the free new plan.
But Harry Nespoli, chairman of the Municipal Labor Committee, harshly dismissed the retirees’ concerns earlier this month in a couple of letters obtained by The News.
“The rump retiree group continues to spread misleading information as to the plan provisions,” Nespoli wrote in a Jan. 10 missive to city union leaders.
On the same day, Nespoli — whose committee serves as an umbrella representative for the city’s 102 public sector unions — made a similar charge in a letter to Mayor Adams, who has faced calls from the retiree group to block the Medicare Advantage switchover before an April 1 automatic enrollment deadline.
Claiming the “so-called retiree group” has spread “ill-founded and misleading allegations,” Nespoli urged Adams to ignore their pleas because “contrary to what you’ve been told,” the Medicare Advantage plan “makes all doctors/hospitals participating in Medicare available” to retirees.
“The NYC Medicare Advantage Plus Plan is a quality plan,” Nespoli told Adams.
But Nespoli’s claim that the new plan allows retirees to keep “all” doctors and hospitals appears to be contradicted by a bill issued this month to the spouse of a retired city teacher who is a patient at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and dependent on municipal Medicare coverage.
The bill, obtained by The News and dated Jan. 1, warns the spouse that the Upper East Side cancer hospital and its doctors “are not providers in any Medicare Advantage Plan networks.”
“If you switch to a Medicare Advantage Plan ... you might not be able to continue to receive Medicare coverage for services provided at the center” or “you might pay substantially more for services,” the bill states.
Nespoli did not return a request for comment Friday.
The Medicare Advantage rollover was initiated under Mayor de Blasio, whose administration argued the new plan would allow the city to save hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars per year thanks to a larger influx of federal funds.
De Blasio’s administration initially wanted to set a November deadline for retirees to opt-out of the plan.
But the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees sued over the move, prompting a Manhattan court to push back the deadline until April 1 amid revelations that literature about the new plan being provided to retirees was riddled with factual errors.
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Adams, who can modify his predecessor’s Medicare switch-up, has not indicated how he plans to handle the issue.
A spokesman for the mayor said late Friday that his “administration is actively reviewing this matter.”
Before taking office on Jan. 1, Adams, a retired NYPD captain, said he wanted to ensure the new Medicare Advantage plan won’t be a “bait and switch” for municipal retirees.
An attorney for the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees, Steve Cohen, said Nespoli’s criticism of his client is “outrageous” given the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center billing issue.
“People being treated for cancer — many of them Ground Zero first responders — should not be treated so poorly, so cavalierly by the city,” Cohen said. “Retirees simply cannot make an informed decision about whether to choose this new health plan when the city is telling them one thing and a key hospital supposedly participating is telling them the exact opposite.”
