For more than 50 years, New York City recruited new employees with an offer that included strong healthcare benefits in retirement. Recently, the City government decided that it could save money by forcing some 250,000 retirees to abandon Medicare and enroll in a for-profit Medicare Advantage Plan administered by Aetna. Retirees had no choice, and most of their unions sided with the City, not their own members.
One incredibly persistent, bold, fearless retiree refused to accept the deal that took away her Medicare and supplementary plan. Marianne Pizzitola, a retired Emergency Medical Technician with the Fire Department, created a group called the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees. The City had promised her those benefits, like other city employees, and she was not going to let the City take them away without her consent.
Pizzitola began to organize. She gathered research, allies, and funds to fight the City and some of its biggest unions, including the United Federation of Teachers. She set up a Facebook account and used social media to recruit other retirees and to explain why the deal was a sell-out. She frequently gave ZOOM briefings to members of her group, whose numbers continued to grow. MA plans, unlike Medicare, require patients to get prior authorizations before allowing major procedures; members of MA plans must use in-network doctors. MA plans have overbilled the federal government by billions of dollars.
The Chief-Leader, a publication for city employees, wrote about her battle with the City in April:
Pizzitola’s enterprise began on Aug. 13, 2021, a Friday, the city still under a Covid cloud, when 17 of the 40 people she had invited to hone opposition to the city’s proposed plan joined a Zoom call. Five would volunteer to mount a challenge to the city’s proposal. At the conclusion of the two-hour call, the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees was launched, and Pizzitola was chosen to lead it as president.
“In a few hours, we had a name, a mission, an attorney, a bank. And then that weekend, I started a PayPal, a YouTube, a Facebook, and I drafted our first website,” she said.
The organization, funded by donations, most of $25, has since grown to include a board of directors and an administrative board along with advisors and volunteers, some of them former city and union officials.
Since that August day, over hundreds of emails, at rallies, on YouTube, Threads, Twitter and TikTok, in strategy sessions with attorneys, at gatherings with retirees, and during court hearings, Pizzitola has parlayed her passion, belief and deep knowledge of sometimes opaque policy points and obscure legislation to, so far, preserve what she adamantly believes the retirees, herself among them, are due.
The NYC retirees’ group sued the City, on the grounds that the City was withdrawing benefits that were promised to its members when they were hired. Many had accepted lower pay because of the excellent benefits, especially the healthcare. The group won in the first court that heard the case. The City appealed, and yesterday the State Court of Appeals unanimously ruled in favor of the retirees and “permanently” barred the City from reneging on its promises to retirees.
Marianne Pizzitola proved that one person can win in the face of overwhelming power and money by recruiting allies, gathering sound research, and communicating effectively. Google her name and you will find numerous videos on YouTube where she explains why Medicare is better than Medicare Advantage and why other retirees should support the fight.
Yesterday, the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees issued the following press release. The full decision is attached.
Retiree Update
WE WON!!!
On March 21, 2024 we had oral arguments and today, May 21, we were given a unanimous decision. We thank all of you for believing in us and our legal team. Without all of you, we would never have got this far. The Court said, the City cannot take away our Medicare Supplement.
This is the exact decision, “Accordingly, the judgment (denominated an order) of the Supreme Court, New York County (Lyle E. Frank, J.), entered September 19, 2023, which, in this hybrid proceeding-class action brought pursuant to CPLR article 78, granted the petition complaint to the extent of permanently enjoining the City respondents/defendants from eliminating petitioner/plaintiff retirees’ existing health insurance, automatically enrolling them in a new Aetna Medicare Advantage Plan, enforcing a June 30, 2023 deadline for retirees to opt out of the new plan, and implementing any other aspect of the City’s new retiree healthcare policy, should be affirmed, without costs.”CELEBRATE. YOU EARNED THIS!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
YAY! YAY! YAY!
It’s pretty sad when people have to form a “union” to fight the paid Union that is supposed to represent a group.
IKR?
My thoughts exactly, and yet here we are.
Totally agree. Silver lining may be that this exposes UFT leadership and spurs a sea change.
It is deeply poignant to know this happened. There’s less doom and gloom in the United States today thanks to Marianne Pizzitola.
Brava to Marianne Pizzitola, a true hero of organized labor. She puts the sell-out UFT leaders to shame. Had this case gone the other way, it would have set a terrible precedent, particularly for the retired members of NYSUT in the rest of the state and elsewhere.
Terrible when retired teachers have to fight both the City and their own union.
Correction
Only two unions, DC 37 which is not functioning and the UFT were for the privatization.
Ronald, those are two very powerful unions. DC 37 has 150,000 members and 90,000 retirees. It represents the city’s lowest paid workers. The UFT and DC 37 represent 60% of city workers. Together they swung the vote of the Municipal Labor Council in favor of MA by Aetna. Most other unions did not approve.
this a great victory. There are too many horror stories about people who lured into MA Congrats to all who assured this victory.
While I am overwhelmed with joy that David beat Goliath, it saddens me that it took such a colossal effort to beat back the city. My local union beat back a similar maneuver by a school board who tried to replace healthcare benefits with a plan that promised to save the district money (mostly by denying coverage). The teachers won; the district had tried to slip it through over summer vacation and blame the union for not returning their “efforts” to communicate that the contract required.
The biggest outrage is that MA was created to privatize Medicare by turning healthcare decisions over to a for-profit company. They make a profit by denying coverage.
Yes! It’s Medicare Disadvantage. Unfortunately we have no choice to use it in Chicago if we were born after 1955.
P.S. I realize you won’t be old enough when you retire. Haha
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If it reaches the US Supreme Court, they may lose.
Insurance companies and their death panels is why I prefer the VA even with its flaws. The decisions at the VA are made by doctors, not for profit, insurance company death panels.
Years ago, I was working at one of the biggest of the educational publishing houses, and HR called a meeting to describe its new benefits plan. The head of HR kicked off the healthcare portion with a breathless little speech about how hard everyone had worked to bring the employees of the company its best healthcare plan EVER. “So excited to be able to share this with you,” she said. Well, the plan was complex, and everything she said about its components was gobbledygook, so I started ignoring her and looking through at the details and making notes. Then I raised my hand and said, “Every premium for every choice we are given as been raise, and every benefit has been cut, often by a lot. You described this as our ‘best healthcare plan ever.’ In what sense, pray tell?”
HR is the devil.
HR is one of Satan’s administrative offices. This same company had a program called The Octopus that enabled C-level folks to spy on any employee’s computer and rummage around on it. I wrote this after working for this outfit:
There’s a TV show I discovered recently called “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell,” and the premise is, it’s hell, and hell is an office environment. Gruesome, and dark humor to be sure, but it amuses me.
Thanks for the recommendation!
I spent much of the day today working to get a pre-authorization from my Medicare Advantage Plan. This after it pre-authorized my recent hospital stay and THEN DENIED PAYMENT to the tune of $27,000. Trying to set that right.
What sick person feels like fighting corporate bureaucracy as well the condition that has made them ill? Medicare, while not perfect, has clear guidelines of coverage or denial for most conditions. Even then, there is an appeal process, which I am sure is a challenge, but it still has to be better than fighting the greedy corporate overlords of MA.
My recollection is that this was one of the ways the UFT was trying to do to deliver unnamed future “savings” in exchange for wages and benefits negotiated in the contract they signed under de Blasio. Wonder where those savings are going to come from now.
Trying to save money for what? iPads?
Referring to my ex-superintendent having his office raided by the FBI for insider trading on a billion dollar iPad deal, my point being that the cuts of austerity usually are brought by those in charge with excuses rather than reasons.
For the city to use elsewhere in its $100 billion budget, $40 billion of which goes to education.
Thank you! You are saving lives!! Your courage and conviction is amazing! This is what we should be teaching the next gen as well!
Be a Shepherd not a sheep!
Totally agree!!!
UFT President Michael Mulgrew was the architect of this debacle. Furthermore he has tried several times to get the city council to change the code that protects our medicare and continues to lie about the facts. Mulgrew/UFT, incredibly, filed an Amicus brief supporting the city against his retirees!!!! To add insult to injury the execrable Randi Weingarten publicly supported Mulgrew in his attempts to seriously harm retirees.
The damage done to teachers by these two UFT presidents is amazing. Let’s hope that UFT retirees manage to defeat retiree head Murphy in this election. That might hopefully spell the beginning of the end for the Unity lock on the UFT.
Is it any wonder that people hate and distrust big unions! This sort of thing has been going on for years but on a much smaller scale. The egregiousness of this is shocking.
why do some who hate big unions hold more venom for the unions than for the management they collaborate with? I say a plague on both their houses.
In rural areas of the United States, there is a lot of anti-union feeling because the uneducated people there bought into the propaganda spread by corporate interests in the first 2/3rds of the 20th century. I heard a lot of this utter bullshit growing up in rural Kentucky in the late 1950s.
A plague on both their houses indeed.
Yet nobody dare say Medicare For All. Yes Unions have great healthcare until they don’t. Of course there is a way around this court ruling. That will be to shift costs to working members. One way or another Cities can not print money nor can they issue unlimited amounts of bonds to pay for bonds. Those Unions who caved on this issue did so in exchange for contract increases for working members. So future contracts will increase Healthcare costs on working members and cut benefits and differ wage increases to pay for the shortfall. Nor in this country can Cities simply tax the rich. The rich who can simply fly in for theater and restaurant weekends from a “Sh.. Hole State”. Of course then there is the Union retirees who formed the middle class, long ago taking their union gotten pensions in Blue states leaving to vote for anti union s… like DeSantis and Haley. The Villages and other retirement communities loaded with them. Those Trump signs there are not just native Floridians. My retirement Plan in one of the private sector Unions that also represented some of those City workers had no co-pays or deductibles for retired members while picking up the 20% of Part B Medicare. The plan had no deductibles for working members. Had is the operative phrase here as of July there will be deductibles on both working and retirees and copay’s have risen on working members. Of course this is after 1700 Union members who had been working for Time Warner Cable for decades , were locked / forced out by Spectrum shortly after they were bought to pay for the buyout. Forced out when with no contract Spectrum refused to contribute to the Medical Plan. It became the longest strike in America and ended in lost jobs. The object of copay’s and deductibles is to dissuade people from seeking care. And for certain, some will not. But of course this is good for those City retirees who will maintain their benefits. But as my Cuban Heritage friend says about her Trumpist anti immigrant parents “After me close the door”
Correction defer
Diane,
Not all such stories have a happy ending.
Take, for example, what has happened to retired teachers in Orange Unified School District (OUSD)in Orange County, California.
Beginning in 1976, active teachers in OUSD began deferring part of their salaries into a trust fund that would provide them with retirement health insurance to supplement their federal Medicare. The trust fund was part of OUSD’s budget that was set up to receive and safeguard the funds.
A bit of background on Orange County, California: Orange County has long been a notoriously conservative stronghold. The California headquarters of the John Birch Society was located within OUSD’s boundaries, as was the 1990s infamous anti-public schools/anti-teacher “Education Alliance”, which in 1994 got the support of the right-wing board of the Orange County Department of Education to turn OUSD into the nation’s first all-charter school district. That attempt failed at the time, but today the right wing Koch-related “California Policy Center” is headquartered in OUSD. It draws up model policy for right wing school boards throughout California to adopt, and it is determined to make OUSD an all-charter district — and it provides funding for school board elections of right wing candidates.
Because of these influences and because of the traditional right wing political bent of Orange County, the OUSD school board has historically been mostly right wing. During the 1990s battle to turn OUSD into an all-charter district, the scofflaw right wing school board ignored the “trust” in “trust fund” and began dipping into the teachers’ retirement health insurance trust fund.
By the late 1990s, the retirement trust fund, which consisted primarily of teachers’ deferred income and was legally theirs, had been nearly depleted of what should have amounted in 1998 to some $98 million.
Confronted with the fact that they had illegally depleted the teachers’ trust fund, the school board said that instead of restoring the trust fund, it would provide teachers with a Medicare Advantage plan. In those days, such plans were legally titled “Medicare Risk” plans, and then, as now, they were risky because the bottom-feeder plans provide miserable coverage and routinely deny claims.
So, in 1999, the teachers in the plan, most of whom had not yet retired, sued OUSD in a class action.
The lawsuit we filed was very costly because the school board was able to use its Deep Pockets of public tax money to press its defense. But because most of the 1,400 teachers in the plan were not yet retired, we were able to sustain the fight in the court.
The result was that on July 31, 2000, California Superior Court, County of Orange, Case 815521, issued a Permanent Injunction that forever prohibits OUSD from ever putting retirees into a Medicare Advantage program.
We thought we had won — permanently won, because that’s what a Permanent Injunction does, right?
Right?
Because of the bad press and high cost to taxpayers of the lawsuit that the scofflaw school board had incurred, there was for a brief while a change in the political make-up of the OUSD school board: Moderate members of the community recalled three of the right wing school board members in 2000 and replaced them with moderate board members who actually respected the law.
The moderate majority on the OUSD board refilled the teachers’ retirement health fund by establishing a public entity trust fund and funding it with a sale of derivatives.
However, by 2022, the right wingers had again taken over the OUSD school board. They returned to their scofflaw ways and were out for revenge on the retirees. Entirely disregarding the Superior Court Permanent Injunction, the right wing majority told retirees in the retirement health insurance program that the school board was going to compel them to enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan.
The school board’s stance was: “So, sue us.”
Retirees — me included — sought legal advice. What we learned was disheartening: Even though the Permanent Injunction remained in force, the Court won’t enforce it. That would be up to us, and that would require filing a new lawsuit to enforce the Injunction.
And the worst part of this bad news that the law firms gave us was that this angry, scofflaw, right wing school board would likely fight and fight and fight in court until the last one of us was dead (I’m 81, and am among the youngest retirees in the retirement health insurance plan).
A number of different law firms whom we consulted said that in view of the Permanent Injunction we would almost certainly eventually win the court battle, but that the battle could last two or three years and cost upwards of $300,000.
Back in 1999 when we sued OUSD and won the Permanent Injunction, most of us were still active teachers and we were able to among us raise the resources for the court battle.
Today, we are retired on fixed incomes, elderly, frail and suffering from illnesses that have been well cared-for by the Medicare Supplemental insurance that our trust fund has paid for over the years. There is no way that we can raise several hundred thousand dollars.
OUSD’s scofflaw school board has played its cards well, and the “So, sue us” strategy will win out over even the Permanent Injunction.
We had naively believed back in 2000 when we won the Permanent Injunction that “permanent” meant just that. We had no idea that a Deep Pockets entity like the school district could simply ignore the Injunction and that it would be up to us to fight another long and costly court battle to enforce the injunction.
So, on January 1, 2024, we lost our Medicare Supplement insurance that has served us so well and that allowed us to remain in the original federal Medicare plan, and we have been placed in a Medicare Advantage plan, which, like all so-called “advantage” plans, is a private plan that took us out of original federal Medicare.
And, whereas, Medicare Supplement plans are required to cover any medical treatment that federal Medicare covers, now that we are in a private Medicare Advantage plan, we are encountering claim denials.
Diane, some stories just don’t have a happy ending.
Medicare Advantage is a scam initiated by the Bush Jr. administration as the first step toward privatization. It should not be called “medicare” and it should not be allowed to advertise during the Medicare sign up period. It promises and then denies, leaving people with feeble coverage. It should be canceled.