Get Out Of Our Pockets!

We don't need your back door premium, thank you very much.

If you’re retired, Unity is reaching into your pocket again. To celebrate the New Year, they’ll take 15 bucks when you visit your doctor. If your doctor is in a hospital, they’ll take another 15 for the hospital. 15 for physical therapy, for blood test, this test, and that test. It might not sound so bad if you’re in service, but we pay fees in-service members do not (and I’ll come back to that).

Truth be told, picking your pocket is not really the job of union leadership. Their job should be to a. get more money in your pockets, or b. figure out ways to see you keep more of it. Their job should be making your life better. Instead, Unity’s prime focus appears to be preserving cushy gigs for their elite, invite-only patronage cult.

Don’t you wish that guy above and his Very Smart People would just keep the hell out of our pockets? I mean, he’s making three times what most teachers make, plus who knows what from NYSUT and AFT. You’d think that would make him happy. But that’s not enough for him. He needs to innovate. He’s managed to set the absurd precedent that we need to fund our own raises, and is forever reaching into our pockets to make it happen. For that, he deems himself Very Smart.

I haven’t been retired very long. I remember when it cost 15 bucks to visit an urgent care. I remember when it went up to 50. I remember when it went up to a hundred, and Mulgrew told the DA he’d have liked to make it four hundred. He thinks it’s his business to discourage us from getting health care. Anything to save money for Eric Frigging Adams.

I’m old enough to remember when the mayor was our contractual adversary, and we didn’t bend over backward trying to save him money.

Who can forget when, to fund raises for in-service members, Unity’s Very Smart People tried to dump all retirees into an inferior Medicare advantage plan? Who can forget Unity’s notion of “choice”—paying an extra 200 bucks a month to keep the care retirees had for free since the 1960s? Who can forget Unity’s casual lack of concern for the many low-paid city employees, like UFT paraprofessionals, who couldn’t afford to lay out 5K per couple, per year?

Who can forget our union bosses giving away over half of our health stabilization fund, a billion dollars, back to the city? (Gee, I wonder why the fund is now bankrupt.) Who can forget when, only four years later, they promised 600 million a year, forever, in exchange for a three-year contract that hovered around cost of living?

I’m going to let you in on a secret—so I hope you’re sitting down. Unity’s Very Smart People are not very smart at all. These are people who just lost a retiree election by a landslide, and they followed up by openly celebrating and applauding ageism.

Furthermore, selling us out to pay debts they never should have incurred was not a particularly strategic move. They have at least two bloggers out there who are too fraidy-scared to place their names to their work. Rather than appeal to logic, they spout juvenile insults. They don’t even know personal attacks aren’t argument.

For special occasions, they call on their Washington liberal elite who’s sat in a chair lobbying for Randi in a think tank for 20 years. After supporting our struggle not at all these last three years, he comes out mansplaining to Marianne Pizzitola. Marianne is a living, breathing unionist folk hero who’s  been tirelessly, successfully battling in the streets and courts for municipal retirees and 9/11 first responders. She does the job our union bosses should have been doing all these years, and instead of thanking her, they attack her.

No wonder they can’t negotiate their way out of a paper bag.

There is hope. Some in Unity are growing weary of Mulgrew’s tyranny. Of course, those aren’t the ones Mulgrew regards as Very Smart. For him, kissing the ring makes you smart. The problem is, though, if that’s your interest, you’re worthless to members, whether retired or in service.

It’s a funny time for those of us who believe. I believe in union. I believe that union lifts us all. When we stand together, we are stronger. When we negotiate together, we are stronger. When things get better for us, they get better for our brothers and sisters in other unions. When we do well, even non-union shops need to compete.

Of course, for that to work, you need leaders who believe in union. Our leaders believe in negotiating behind our backs. Our leaders make a big show of a 500-member negotiating team, but tell them they can negotiate for neither pay nor health care. For pay, they let the city low ball the first suckers they can muster (sometimes us). For health, they lean on the MLC, where only bosses make the decisions.

On December 27th, my wedding anniversary (and my dog’s birthday), I visited my doctor. It may prove the last time I was able to visit a doctor without paying a co-pay. I’ve been retired only a year and a half, but since I was a little boy city retirees have not paid premiums.

I remember hearing about the premiums at some meeting or other. Mulgrew said it was a temporary thing. I didn’t believe it, but I don’t believe a whole lot of what he says. That said, I’d very much like to make it temporary. There is a lawsuit called Bianculli, brought by our good friends at NYC Retirees. We shall see where that leads.

Why are we relying on NYC Retirees to protect us? That’s the job of our union leaders.

NYC Retirees were able to block the copays for a while because the contract with Emblem did not allow for them. Mulgrew’s Very Smart People, evidently, had not bothered to read it. But MLC, along with UFT Unity, is the gift that just keeps on giving. They allowed the city to renegotiate the contract, and the court dropped the injunction on copays.

Unity members, paid with our dues, love to impose co-pays. They’re out of control for in-service members. You’ll pay a hundred bucks to visit Pro Health or City MD. The last time I visited Pro Health, the bill was just a little more than a hundred bucks. So if I’d been in-service, I’d have paid the bulk of that bill.

It’s true that those in-service have it worse than we do, as far as co-pays go. But it’s not quite as simple as that.

Unity absolutely opposes premiums. Unless you’re a retiree.

Retirees pay a $150 a month premium, just up from 120, each, for pharmacy insurance. Retirees pay 25% of their pharmacy costs, which can be excessive. I had one prescription, a generic, with 300 a month co-pay. My doctor swapped it out for one that brought me closer to 80 a month, but right there is $960 a year. Don’t get me started on non-generics (and I hope my doctors read this).

If Medicare-eligible retirees could use GoodRX in conjunction with our plan, we’d all save a lot. But you can’t do that with Medicare Part D—because government negotiators are, like Unity negotiators, Very Smart People.

We get part of our pharmacy premium back. I’m told it’s $840. So if I pay 150 a month, that is 1800 less 840, and I pay 960. I don’t get my wife’s premium refunded though, so it’s 1800 plus 960, and we pay $2760 a year in premiums. Next year, the drugs are capped at 2K each, so we will pay somewhere between $2760 and $6760. That’s before we pay Unity’s new co-pays.

On that basis, I’m not at all sure in-service members have it worse than we do. And new co-pays are going to particularly hurt paraprofessionals. UFT big shots suddenly discovered paraprofessionals this year (after the paras voted against them by a factor of three to one). Paraprofessionals retire with much lower pensions than teachers.

I’ve watched co-pays climb up, and up and up over the years I worked. I started in 1984. I think the co-pay then was five dollars. You know where that led. It’s a slippery slope once you open that door.

It’s kind of like the way Mulgrew and his paid ducklings speak about premiums for in-service members. They are absolutely unacceptable. If the city tries to impose them, he will oppose, oppose, oppose. Never mind that Unity’s Very Smart People explicitly agreed to them.

But the new co-pays ARE back door premiums.

One thing that differentiates us from in-service members is we don’t get raises. If Unity decides, in their infinite wisdom, to mortgage our health insurance in order to procure a contract, we benefit from it not at all. It’s outrageous they’d even contemplate doing so, but they’ve now gone well beyond that.

We need leadership that will stand up for all of us. We need leadership that will find out what union members want and need, as opposed to making lazy, stupid deals that display no vision whatsoever. I will work to make that happen, and I hope you will join me.

In fact, if you’re a retiree, I hope you will join my friends and me on January 5th so we can discuss these very things!

Thanks to two Dans.