The Incivility of Michael Mulgrew and his Medicare Dis-Advantage Plan

Michael Mulgrew has trampled on the dignity of UFT and city retirees by selling out their healthcare behind closed doors, forcing them into an inferior plan and breaking the promises made to them.

Tom Murphy, Mulgrew’s man at the head of the UFT Retired Teachers Chapter, is running in the upcoming chapter election on a platform of rejecting incivility. 

​​Murphy thinks that the trouble with UFT retirees is that they are angry with him. He thinks that retirees who express their frustrations over his healthcare sellout - to a Medicare Advantage plan - are uncivil. But there is nothing more uncivil than pulling healthcare benefits from underneath senior citizens. 

Dignity comes before decorum. Politeness matters, but not as much as quality, life-saving healthcare.

It is Murphy's boss, Michael Mulgrew, whose incivility must be objected to. Mulgrew is the architect of the proposed Medicare dis-Advantage plan that would irreparably harm so many Medicare eligible retirees. It is he who, behind closed doors, tried to sell our healthcare to the highest bidder among profit-making, publicly traded, predatory, insurance companies.

It is Mulgrew who has tied his financial interests and political ambitions to those of our former employer. It is Mulgrew who values his company perks and seat at the political table more than he values the health and wellbeing of his union members. It is Mulgrew who has broken the UFT's promises to its members. 

Mulgrew buys the support of his Unity cult with patronage jobs at 52 Broadway. He has created a culture of fear and loathing in the UFT offices. And when he is gone, the myrmidons of Mulgrew will rejoice. Once they can no longer be terminated by Mulgrew, or reassigned to Siberia, the Unity faithful will immediately repudiate his policies and decry his bullying tactics. They will excuse themselves from their former complicity with claims of having been under a tragic spell, and they will salve their consciences with the rosy glow at the end of the Mulgrew nightmare.

But UFT retirees can't afford to wait for Mulgrew's departure. Our alarm has sounded. Our wake-up call is now. Union-proud retirees are left with little choice but to work for change right now and elect new leadership to the Retired Teachers Chapter. We must speak out, organize, lobby, and litigate over the prospect of being thrown into a health insurance plan that threatens our lives and the lives of our loved ones. That is not incivility - it is a life and death imperative. 

Do you want to know what real incivility looks like? Read on…

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Incivility #1: Selling Out Retirees and Forcing Us into Unproven Mulgrewcare

In 2014, Michael Mulgrew orchestrated and brokered a contract agreement with the City of New York, securing retro payments for UFT members after seven years without a contract.  The retro payments were partially funded by healthcare givebacks, not just of UFT retirees, but on the backs of all city workers and retirees.

In this clandestine deal, over a billion dollars was taken out of the Healthcare Stabilization Fund. The Stabilization Fund was designed to ensure rising healthcare costs are covered for city workers. It is not meant to be a slush fund for wages. 

Millions were also siphoned from the Stabilization Fund and put into the union’s UFT Welfare Fund. For the cash infusion, Mulgrew promised the city healthcare "savings" to replenish the Health Stabilization Fund. Well, we know how that goes. Savings for the city means healthcare cuts for us. Shifting Medicare-eligible city retirees into a privatized Medicare Advantage was one of the cost cutting options to be considered.

UFT members were never told about the deal in real time. When the 2014 contract was proposed for ratification by the Delegate Assembly, the contract appendix that contained details about the benefit cuts were hidden from the delegates. ​

Four years later, during the next round of contract negotiations, Mulgrew dug the hole even deeper. In 2018, as a key player in the the Muncipal Labor Committee (MLC), Mulgrew promised the City $600M a year in endlessly recurring health benefit cuts. 

By 2020-21, the hole was up to Mulgrew's ears. To pay his debt, Mulgrew helped design the controversial Medicare Advantage Plan (MAP), now dubbed "Mulgrewcare."

The plan - Mulgrew's great plan - was that retirees would be auto-enrolled into Mulgrewcare, and if they didn't like it, too bad. They would have to opt-out and pay premiums to remain on the city's most popular health plan: Medicare + GHI Senior Care. 

Retirees have big problems with this. 

1. Medicare + GHI Senior Care is nationally accepted throughout the US, everywhere retirees live. Mulgrew Care Is not.

2. Medicare + GHI Senior Care is accepted by virtually every hospital and all doctors. Mulgrewcare is not. It has a limited network of providers.

3. Medicare + GHI Senior Care keeps healthcare decisions between patient and doctor. In Mulgrewcare, health decisions are made by AI generated algorithms and insurance company bureaucrats.

In addition, Mulgrewcare requires prior authorizations for thousands of medical treatments that traditional Medicare does not require. And it exposes seniors living in continuing-care, residential communities to the danger of being denied care, or else be on the hook for financially ruinous bills.

As an added incivility, Mulgrew, the City, and the insurance companies, even tried to coerce retirees into Mulgrewcare Advantage by adding co-payments to their existing GHI Senior Care plan. Mulgrew went along with this scheme even though he knew, or should have known, that it was illegal - as was later ruled in Manhattan Supreme Court.

The incivilities don't end there. Mulgrewcare strips retirees of their peace of mind and their freedom of choice, and Michael Mulgrew has not once extended the civility of seeking retiree consent for his plan. He will not allow UFT membership to vote on Mulgrewcare, despite over ten thousand union members putting their signature on a petition asking for just that.

In the face of such real vulgarities, what are UFT retirees expected to do, other than organize and litigate against the injustice? In a twisted logic, that is what Michael Mulgrew and Tom Murphy refer to as "incivility." That is absurd.

In the last three years, it has been the work of retirees coming together through grassroots organizations - such as Retiree Advocate/UFT, and with the leadership of the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees - that has, so far, successfully sought relief in the courts and fought back against the real incivilities leveled against us.

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Incivility #2: Offering Inferior, Predatory Healthcare to Seniors

Medicare Advantage is notorious for denying, disrupting, and delaying care. It's how the corporate privateers in Big Healthcare make their money and enrich their shareholders.

The New York Times writes, in one of many investigative reports about this, "Tens of millions of denials are issued each year for both authorization and reimbursements, and audits of the private insurers show evidence of 'widespread and persistent problems related to inappropriate denials of services and payment,' investigators found."

Mulgrew thinks his Medicare Advantage experiment is immune from this practice. Mulgrew brags that his big, beautiful, shiny Mulgrewcare version of Medicare Advantage temporarily suspends some of the usual medical pre-authorizations.

For only two years.

But there is a cost for those temporary suspensions. Big Healthcare isn't suspending them out of the generosity of their big corporate hearts. Mulgrew and the city are paying them to do it. Aetna receives a monthly bounty for every city retiree who gets relief from the agreed subset of pre-authorizations. And, after two years, if the bounties prove to be unprofitable for Aetna's shareholders, then all bets are off. This is nothing more than a band-aid to stop the hemorrhaging, but the band-aid is falling off. 

And Mulgrew admits that his buddies in Big Healthcare cannot be trusted. That's why he proposes to counter Big Healthcare’s lust for denials by setting up an internal UFT bureaucracy with checkpoints and fines for non-compliance.

Here's the crazy thing that Mulgrew doesn't seem to grasp, or maybe he grasps all too well: Our much-loved, traditional Medicare + GHI Senior Care plan, doesn't require an added UFT bureaucracy. The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services already handles all the bureaucratic red tape for traditional Medicare. And it does it very well, with much lower administrative costs than insurance companies charge. It does a much better job at it than any single union, even the UFT, can ever hope to. And it does it for free.

Mulgrew just doesn’t seem to get it. His ridiculous schemes and workarounds offer little or nothing to the retirees who are left waiting weeks and months for an approval of care to come through, or a denial of care to be appealed. One delay or denial of care - just one - can be debilitating, life-threatening or even fatal. Just one. This doesn't happen with traditional Medicare.

To Big Healthcare, however, delays and denials are a feature, not a bug. Watch this harrowing New York Times video to learn how delays and denials of care are part and parcel of Big Healthcare's profit-making model.

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Incivility #3: Breaking Promises and Compromising Our Values

We were promised that if we took jobs working for the city, we might not have the highest wages, but we would have good benefits throughout our careers, and we would keep our health benefits into retirement. 

How great an incivility is it then, to break those sacred promises to the most vulnerable among us? To the seniors who simply want to enjoy their retirement, to the career paraprofessionals who are scratching by on lowly pensions, to the disabled and infirm who can't even conceive of the upheavals that Mulgrew has in store for them? Mahatma Gandhi said, "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members." It is a statement that takes the measure of a society's humanity, and by that measure, Michael Mulgrew and his Unity faction have lost their humanity. They have become unmoored from their moral compass.  

Does Michael Mulgrew show civility or respect for seniors, and the Medicare-eligible disabled among us, when he denounces retirees' efforts to protect our own lives? In his topsy-turvy world, we are denounced as enemies of Union, for doing the actual work of the Union; work that Mulgrew and Murphy should be doing in the trenches alongside us.

We are civil servants. Mulgrew and Murphy are the servants of incivility. We are rank-and-file members of NYC municipal unions, not just the UFT. We built this city - many even rebuilt it after 9/11 - and fought for the foundational benefits we have today. We did not fight so that those benefits could be stripped from us, and so we could be dumped into a predatory, inferior, privatized alternative to traditional Medicare.

Our health benefits are not an entitlement. They are benefits we earned with our service to the city. They are benefits that we paid for with our low public-sector salaries, and a lifetime of tax contributions. 

Michael Mulgrew and Unity beg for our loyalty, but they threaten to discard us in retirement. They lay claim to our trust but switch the rules in the middle of the game. What is more uncivil than that? 

And why is Mulgrew pursuing Medicare privatization in the first place? Organized Labor has fought for decades against Medicare privatization. We in the UFT spent many years pushing back against the hedge-fund billionaires and the charter school profiteers who wanted to destroy our profession, kill our union, and privatize public education. Why would we ever acquiesce to letting the same sharks devour our public Medicare system? 

Traditional Medicare is a public health good. It was a major win in the civil rights era. It's not perfect, but it’s a Great Society program that provides equity of healthcare access to all citizens in their golden years and was widely supported by Labor. 

There was even a time, not too long ago, when Tom Murphy used to write to retirees about the evils of privatizing Medicare. But now, with a $70K a year patronage gig as a Special Rep to NYSUT, he believes privatization is better. Or at least, he claims to believe that, if Michael Mulgrew tells him to.

Mr. Mulgrew and Mr. Murphy, how did you allow things to get so toxic and so far-removed from what’s right?

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Call to Action. Vote Retiree Advocate.

A few years ago, Mulgrew said the words you hear in this video while speaking to a raucous crowd at an AFT convention. Mulgrew was a big fan of Common Core (go figure), and he defended it being taken away from teachers. He exclaimed:

“If someone takes something from me, I’m going to grab it right back out of their cold, twisted, sick hands and say, ‘It is mine!’ You do not take what is mine! 

And I’m going to punch you in the face and push you in the dirt because this is the teachers!”

That is exactly the way we feel about traditional Medicare + Senior Care! The irony of Mulgrew’s position now, versus then, is not lost on us. Today, UFT and city retirees need Mr. Mulgrew to know he must get his cold, twisted, sick hands off our healthcare! 

So, we must take action to preserve our healthcare, and one way to do that is with the power of our vote.

Vote for the Retiree Advocate slate in the upcoming Retired Teachers Chapter (RTC) election. The Retiree Advocate slate of over 300 seasoned, experienced UFT organizers and activists are ready to lead on Day One, and ready to defend our benefits.

Ballots will be mailed out on May 10th. Mail-in ballots must be returned by June 13th. Be sure to mark an “X” for the Retiree Advocate slate on the first page of the ballot and mail it back promptly. Please be sure to vote for the entire slate, rather than mix and match individual candidates. Slate voting magnifies the power of your vote and is the best way to effect change and return sanity to the RTC.

By voting Retiree Advocate, you say:

✅ Yes! to nationwide healthcare access

✅ Yes! to premium and co-pay free supplemental insurance

❌ No! to countless pre-authorizations 

❌ No! to paying more for uncovered doctors and hospitals 

❌ No! to disrupting our continuity of care

❌ No! to privatizing traditional Medicare

To learn more about Retiree Advocate, go to: retireeadvocate.org

Finally, please join this fight by teaming up with The New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees. They are advocating for the struggle to maintain quality healthcare benefits through political lobbying and litigation in the courts. Consider a donation to their legal fund. Over 28k city retirees have joined the NYC Retirees community, thus far. 

Union democracy and civility are here if we vote for it. Join us in making it happen!

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Bennett Fischer is a retired teacher and former UFT chapter leader. He is currently running for the RTC chapter leader position, along with 299 others on the Retiree Advocate slate.

Marianne Pizzitola is the president of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees. NYC Retirees is leading the court fights against the city’s plan to force retirees into Medicare Advantage.

Daniel Alicea is a veteran middle school teacher and lead organizer of Educators of NYC. He is the editor of The Wire: Powered by Educators of NYC.

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