Medicare disadvantage: Without insurance switch, NYC Council should find new way to save

In the latest twist in a long-running saga, a bill to change city law to allow the Adams administration to begin charging insurance premiums to retirees who opt not to move into a new Medicare Advantage plan appears to be dead. Adams may yet try to ax the original Medicare program to leave only the new one standing, though that’s a less ideal solution to letting the programs coexist.

Fine, then, if the proposal is so anathema to Council members, they should have to explain how exactly they plan to replenish the Health Insurance Stabilization Fund. Let’s remember that the $600 million in annual savings that Medicare Advantage was supposed to generate were to be reinvested into the fund, which itself serves some crucial purposes, among them supplementing dental, vision and prescription drug coverage for current city workers.

The fund hasn’t exactly been well-managed, and is burning through cash faster than it can replenish it even without wrongheaded moves to use it as a piggy bank for unrelated purposes like wage increases, which has left it near insolvency. This is a predicament so foreseeable that the Citizens Budget Commission was specifically warning about it as far back as 2011.

Now, the city’s facing an uncertain fiscal picture, and while there are additional avenues for the mayor to find savings, like reining in overtime, things won’t shake out if the cost-cutting measures he’s putting in place are blocked by a Council that isn’t in a rush to offer ideas of its own. At a moment when the city is having trouble attracting and retaining talent, torpedoing a fund designed to support low-cost access to medical care — one of the benefits that attracts people to public service — seems like a rather poor idea.

As budget negotiations get going in earnest, instead of coming up with new ways to spend, how about the City Council putting some ideas on the table to ensure the viability of the stabilization fund and the entire city’s budget?

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