City Health Plan Faces a Legal Challenge

The dog, yet again, ate Unity's homework.

There’s a little thing called due diligence. That means you prepare for as many eventualities as possible. As teachers, we also have to be prepared for the unpredictable. That’s perhaps the most challenging part of our jobs. Our ostensible leaders, though, fail to prepare for the totally predictable, even though they’ve been through it before, and repeatedly so.

In a move that will likely surprise no one, Michael Mulgrew and Unity have once again been caught with their pants down. A coalition of city workers is suing to block the new health plan, claiming it violates city regulation. Not only that, but I’m told the regulation in question is 12-126, the very same one it violated when they tried to make retirees pay 200 bucks a month to retain their “premium-free health care.”

This is remarkable. Mulgrew and Unity fell on their faces in more ways than one when they tried to sell that to retirees. First of all, they managed to lose multiple court cases to our heroic friends at NYC Retirees. Then, in a landslide, they lost the Retired Teacher Chapter. Remarkably, these humiliating losses have taught them nothing. That’s the nature of hubris, I suppose.

When you’re a Master of the Universe, viewing the world through your 14th floor office windows, you trust your Very Smart People and hope for the best. We, as dues-paying members, have every right to expect better. Not only that, but we are mostly teachers. We come to our classes prepared. We have every right to expect the same from our leadership. In fact, with someone like Michael Mulgrew being paid triple teacher salary, we should expect more.

Mulgrew sent an email to members. It contains a number of troubling statements. One, of course, is the contention that the DA overwhelmingly approved it. While technically true, what the DA overwhelmingly approved was Unity’s spin on the contract. The DA, like the health committee before it, was not permitted to see the actual contract. Only after the votes was a redacted version of the contract released.

We still don’t know what the actual contract says.

That’s troubling. More troubling still is the implication that with all King Mulgrew’s Horses, and all his Men, all his Very Smart People, all his lawyers, all the MLC members and their lawyers, no one bothered to check whether self-insurance was lawful. (This is what comes of rushed negotiations and shoving secret contracts down the throats of sycophants lusting over cushy gigs at 52 Broadway.)

Mulgrew claims he will not let them win. Perhaps that’s true, but his abysmal record in court suggests otherwise. He also claims, correctly, that if the plan is scuttled, he’ll have to go in and negotiate a continuation of the current plan. He suggests there would be negative consequences, and that’s probably true. However, should that prove to be the case, it will be the fault of his prideful, arrogant, and unspeakably lazy Patronage Cult.

A bunch of Unity teachers failed to do their homework. Rank and file will pay the cost.

Why is this group bringing this lawsuit? According to Michael Mulgrew, it’s because “they want to tear down what we worked for.” This, of course, is yet another case of Unity exercising the psychic powers with which they credit themselves. More to the point, it’s a straw man fallacy. That’s when you credit your enemy with an argument to which you can easily respond, rather than refuting the actual argument.

In fact, according to the article, their lawsuit has to do with MLC violating the law, you know, the thing that if you or I were to do, we’d face fines, jail time, or, you know, actual penalties.

The legal challenge argues that the city’s plan to replace the GHI Comprehensive Benefits Plan with a new Administrative Services Only model, branded NYCE PPO, violates the New York City Administrative Code.

The code requires that municipal workers, retirees, and their dependents be provided with health insurance coverage through licensed insurers that assume financial risk and are regulated by the state.

That, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with tearing down what Unity worked for. Furthermore, it appears they have a legitimate concern:

‘If the City runs out of money, we will run out of healthcare’

That, as far as I can tell, is something well worth worrying about. Now, sure, Unity will contend otherwise. But aren’t these the very same people who took a robust Health Stabilization Fund and ran it into the ground? Why is it now broke? That’s because Mulgrew’s Very Smart People saw fit to hand a billion dollars of it back to the city in exchange for a sub-inflationary contract, and then pissed the rest of it away in similarly bad deals.

Do you trust these folks to sell you a contract you aren’t allowed to view? Do you trust them to maintain the funding necessary to maintain your health care? I have to tell you this—I most certainly do not. Despite Mulgrew’s bluster about not losing this, I hear MLC is holding an emergency meeting to discuss it. That, to me, does not suggest overconfidence.

I’ll state once more that, not having seen this plan, I hope it’s all Mulgrew claims it is. Given his previous behavior, though, I have no reason whatsoever to trust him.

And let’s be clear—should this plan fall by the wayside, it will not be because of people who filed the lawsuit. It will be because of the sloppy, overconfident machinations of the Unity Caucus, who’ve clearly learned nothing from their humiliating history of failed, unproductive health ideas.

We pay their inflated salaries. They owe us better, far better, than this.