NEW YORK CITY, January 9—The city council held a meeting to debate the topic of whether to amend Administrative Code 12-126. This code provides some protection for retired city workers’ healthcare. Retired city workers are fed up with the NYC bosses trying to destroy their medical benefits. As this week has shown with the courageous strike by NYC nurses (see page 3), whose main demand has been patient staffing ratios, the bosses have no interest in preserving the health of the working class. Under capitalism, even with traditional Medicare, healthcare has little to do with keeping workers healthy and everything to do with keeping bosses in control.
Forcing workers into Medicare Advantage plans, so that bosses can make profits is deadly for our entire class. As capitalism spirals into a deeper crisis the bosses’ hands will be forced to cut more life-saving services for workers. They need to finance their next major global conflict with rivals China and Russia, so that they can remain at the top of the imperialist food chain.
The bosses' dictatorship will never vote to fully provide our class with free and life-saving preventive healthcare if conflicts with their bottom line. Such care can only exist in a system that puts worker’s lives above profits. That system is communism–run by and for the international working class.
Workers pressure pols
Retired city workers have bombarded their council people with over 10,000 emails and phone calls. More than 200 workers signed up to testify against amending the Code and to support their fellow workers for over eleven grueling hours. The irony of this waiting was that workers had to sit through a representative from the Office of Labor Relations praising the Aetna Medicare Advantage Plan.
Even some of the council members were disgusted because there was no written copy of the plan and no guarantees for what workers would face after five years.
Shoddy healthcare
The bosses want to destroy Medicare: 43 percent of Medicare members are already in privatized plans. The federal government, both Republicans and Democrats, have been providing subsidies to advance the schemes of insurance companies and investors to put the pot of healthcare money in their pockets rather than to provide healthcare to the working class. Now Aetna is promising a plan supposedly with few denials of coverage but when the whole system is privatized Aetna will increase co-pays, premiums and many denials of service. In Medicare 2 percent of the healthcare dollar goes to administrative costs, while in Medicare Advantage Plans 12-18 percent of the healthcare dollar goes to administrative costs or higher salaries for insurance executives and profits.
Sellout union
After the city’s representative of the insurance company interests spoke, the sell-out union leaders spoke supporting amending the code. The union misleaders insulted their members by saying that the problem was that some workers will not accept change. Workers have a right to be scared because changing Code 12-126 will enable the city administration to change the HIP/HMO benchmark rates of $900 that the city must pay for every worker’s healthcare. 12-126 ensures an equal subsidy for all city employees and has done so since 1967. 12-126 sets a defined price threshold set in city law. Past lawsuits have blocked the city from forcing retirees to pay extra money to stay in traditional Medicare when they reject Medicare Advantage plans. Code 12-126 states that the city must provide a premium free plan to all retirees. Without the fear of continuing lawsuits, which the organization fighting to retain equity in healthcare has been winning, the city will be free to force retirees into Medicare Advantage plans.
Since 1967, unions have negotiated and provided healthcare choice to members while Code 12-126 has been in effect. UFT misleader, Mike Mulgrew, is saying that only by amending Code 12-126 could he continue to provide a choice for his members. The only “choice” that he wants to provide is to divide the working class. Poor city retiree workers will be forced to go into Medicare Advantage while he will make a deal to enable retired city workers with more money to pay about $2300 a year as an individual or $4600 a year as a couple to keep traditional Medicare enrollment. At the same time Mulgrew backed the city’s looting of healthcare stabilization funds to finance teacher raises and retroactive pay rather than forcing the city to pay those costs.
Reject bosses’ sick democracy, fight for communism
Some of the Democratic members of the City Council stated that they supported the struggle of the nurses and regarded healthcare as a human right. One council member said Aetna shouldn’t be considered as a healthcare provider since the company began by insuring enslaved people for enslavers. He stated that the city’s budget for 2023 is $99.7 billion. Paying $600 million for city workers’ healthcare is a minimal cost compared to the deaths of thousands of retirees because of inferior healthcare.
While we don’t know how city council members will vote, we do know that voting is the bosses’ tool to solving their problems. Mayor Adams, a Black liberal fascist mayor, is committed to saving costs at the expense of New York City workers’ lives. But even if the majority Black-, Brown- and woman-run liberal New York City Council and Mayor Adams decided to vote no on the Medicare Advantage plan, that healthcare was garbage in the first place. As long as we put our stock in in the bosses’ democracy it would ultimately mean being spared today, so that we may be sacrificed in their next world war.
We live in a capitalist dictatorship and it is ultimately the bosses’ profit-making priorities that control what policies are passed and how they are carried out. More importantly their decision making process is further hampered by a system that is currently in utter disarray, making them wholly incapable of meeting workers’ needs.
City workers need to organize other workers to support their struggle for equitable healthcare. We certainly can’t rely on our union leadership, the courts or politicians to ensure our healthcare. The only solution is to create a healthcare system under communism that will be based on providing equitable, preventive and effective medical care based on the needs of the working class not on capitalist profits.
Therefore,workers must organize as a class to strangle the toxic bloodsucking vipers that sicken and kill us once and for all.