Retirees' thoughts on Medicare?

To the editor:

Recent New York Daily News and New York Post editorials regarding the city’s attempt to convert retirees from Medicare to Medicare Advantage contain several factual errors.

The mayor’s plan to force 240,000 retirees out of Medicare into a private insurance Advantage Plan will not save the city — or we the taxpayers — a penny, let alone $600 million. Any savings that will accrue from not paying for our Medigap insurance will be transferred to the unions’ Health Stabilization Fund.

There are other means to provide the same funding, including in the Fiscal 2024 budget, and in previous health care savings proposals.

The vast majority of retirees live in New York City or the surrounding suburbs. There has yet to be a group of us advocating for a private for-profit plan. A majority of the DC37 retirees have annual pensions below $25,000, and have similarly low Social Security benefits below $15,000 based on their earned income as city workers.

Waiving the Aetna plan is not financially possible for these people.

There have been a multitude of reports from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services documenting the billions of dollars in fraudulent claims by these insurance behemoths, including Aetna. Why should taxpayers have to subsidize these practices?

The Municipal Labor Committee represents the 95 percent of non-managerial city employees who have collective bargaining rights. They do not represent retirees, because we are not current employees.

The MLC rejected a 2021 request from the Council of Municipal Retirees Organization to include the president of the DC37 Retirees Association in discussions of the original Advantage Plan because we have no such rights.

The courts, the City Council and the state legislature are our only means of defending our health care against our former unions, and the administration.

Stuart Eber

The author is president of the Council of Municipal Retirees Organization