Happy Halloween. Here's a Calendar, and an Extensive List of New Co-Pays

Now please shut up and leave us alone

On Halloween a student dressed like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark entered our English class 15 minutes late. I looked at my watch and shook my head. The student smiled, reached into a plastic pumpkin, and offered me a small bag of cookies. It was a little tricky, but also charming. I smiled back, thanked her, but declined the cookies.

When I got home, I looked at the mail. No cookies there. I got a NYSUT calendar, which I suppose is intended as a treat. When I was in service I got one every year. I never used it. These days I have an iPhone, which means I use it even less.

It’s got important information though. For example, it lets me know the Retired Teachers Chapter Leader is some guy named Thomas Murphy. I could’ve sworn we elected Bennett Fischer, but perhaps I’m mistaken. Or maybe the UFT RTC election isn’t valid in whatever town this calendar is published.

Still, it’s a good thing I don’t plan my school year around the NYSUT calendar. Its coverage begins in September, and I didn’t receive it until the last day of October. It came with a letter from UFT President Michael Mulgrew. There was a handy list of phone numbers, just in case I feel like sitting on hold and waiting to speak to someone.

Also included was the following paragraph—

We know you spent your career working on behalf of the students of New York City, and we will continue to fight every day to protect your excellent pension and health benefits so you can continue to enjoy a comfortable retirement. That’s our promise to you.

Hilarious though that premise (and promise) may have been, I still found the student more charming than Mulgrew. She simply didn’t want trouble for being late. Beyond recording the lateness, I hadn’t planned to give her trouble anyway.

I’m currently donating pretty regularly to NYC Retirees to fight lawsuits that threaten our health care . And while Unity may take me for a fool, claiming they now oppose Medicare Advantage, I know full well that they’re the ones who started trying to force us into it. I know that, if we want to fight it, we cannot count on them at all. I hear MLC, including Unity, is opposing Intro 1096, a City Council bill designed to guarantee us a Medigap option. I hear they’re doing this under the guise of protecting us.

Thanks a lot.

The next envelope I opened was from Emblem Health. Starting in January, every time I saw a doctor, spoke to a doctor, or breathed in the vicinity of a doctor, it would be $15 per visit. I pondered how this would help me “to enjoy a comfortable retirement.”

I pondered this further when I noticed for labs, it would be $15 per test. When I get a prescription for blood tests, it’s not usually for one test. It could be five or six. Maybe more. So that’s 75-90 bucks if the tests are in that range. Sometimes doctors ask for weekly tests.

These things tend to add up, particularly when you’re on a fixed income. If you’ve worked for the city for any length of time, you know co-pays go nowhere but up. Unity makes a big deal of health coverage being “premium free.” But introducing co-pays where they’ve never been is a slippery slope. It’s like a premium you pay only if you have the poor judgement to be sick. And in case no one in Unity has gotten the memo, retirees, due simply to our age, tend to get sick more frequently.

Unity has in-service people paying hundred-dollar co-pays for urgent care to discourage them from going. I suppose they can see primary care doctors, if available, to save cash. However, they pay lab tests co-pays per visit. Furthermore, we don’t have any other place to go if we don’t feel like paying through the nose for lab tests. So the question becomes where, exactly, Unity is telling us to go. We won’t get to tell Unity where to go until May. Meanwhile, this can be an extreme hardship.

Imagine that. Imagine if you were a UFT paraprofessional, or a DC37 member trying to eke by on a very small pension. That could be a crippling expense. And what does Unity expect us to do about it? I suppose they could argue that our insurance is great as long as we don’t get sick.

At our last meeting, Unity tried to humiliate NYC Retirees leader Marianne Pizzitola, along with our lawyer. How much are you getting paid? Nothing, said Marianne. The lawyer didn’t answer. That said, it’s well worth it to me to pay to fight for our health care. I don’t care if the lawyer gets paid well. If I believed Michael Mulgrew were working for us, instead of Eric Frigging Adams, it wouldn’t bother me that he goes home with triple teacher salary and Lord Knows What in lavish trips, meals, and other expenses.

It’s absurd that we have to battle our own union “leaders” to maintain our health care. It’s remarkable that Mulgrew can muster the audacity to oppose legislation that would protect us, under the outlandish pretense it would somehow hurt us to have our health care guaranteed by city regs. The fact is not having guaranteed it protected has allowed Mulgrew and his BFFs at City Hall to try and take it from us.

On the other hand, maybe the calendars could be practical. We could use them to record every incidence of the $15 Mulgrew tax. As Mulgrew and his Patronage Cult run around looking to see how they can trade our health care for sub-par raises retirees never receive anyway, maybe we could keep a collective tally. Maybe we could stand in front of 52 Broadway and burn our calendars in protest.

Do you remember Count Floyd on SCTV? Every week he’d say, “Boys and girls, I have a really scary movie for you this week. I know, last week I said it would really be scary and it wasn’t. But this week, for sure!”

Well boys and girls, maybe Count Floyd should partner with Unity. It’s really very scary to have union bosses who look to diminish, rather than improve, our health care. It’s scary when union leaders have funds to protect our health, and trade them back to the city for sub-inflationary contracts. Scarier still is their conviction we’re too stupid to notice.

You know who’s even more scared than we are? That would be the Unity Caucus. There’s an election coming in May, and those of us who really do the work are no longer buying their tired old song and dance. Sure, they’ll trudge out the same old laundry list of lies to scare us into voting for them. They’ll do Count Floyd proud.

But this election, we won’t be fooled again.

Thanks to Daniel Alicea for the graphic.