Bill 1096-2024: A Stab At Corporate And Governing Collusion

January 1, 2025 | johnmudd

MSCC, John Mudd, December 31, 2024

You may have read our last release, The Truth Is, We’re Dying! The conclusion is hard coming, with the motive still disorienting—not that it can’t be reasoned, it’s the willingness to inflict so much cruelty or the ability to ignore people’s suffering that is hard to comprehend.

I’m not sure when we went from being tolerated to being ignored, tortured, and murdered; albeit much more subtle than the slaughter of Palestinians or Ukrainians. —Sorry, I know no-one wants to stare at that mangled train wreck smoldering along the rails as they struggle with our housing, hunger, and health crises.

But the clues are there with the prints on the murder weapon! More deadly than a candlestick, rope, lead pipe, dagger, or revolver, with much less of a punch than a bomb, the murder weapon of choice, guised as healthcare, extracts a shit ton of profit and hastens our end quite effectively. 

Speaking to the primitive corporate motive, Wendell Potter, once an insider, now an activist, said of his 20 plus years working in health insurance, “I saw the unrelenting pressure investors put on insurers to spend less paying out claims. The average amount insurers spent on medical care dropped from 95 cents per premium dollar in 1993, the year I joined Cigna, to approximately 85 cents per dollar in 2011, after the Affordable Care Act restricted how much insurers can profit from premiums. Since then, big insurers have bought physician practices, clinics and pharmacy middlemen, largely to increase their bottom line.”New York Time, Wendell Potter, December 18, 2024

As Corporate wealth rise, so does our burdening costs. Every day, far too many Americans need to navigate a hostile health insurance landscape to get the care and medicines that their doctors say they need; so that profits can be made and shared with the CEO’s and shareholders, while we go bankrupt and die. 

Bart, my neighbor, who lives downstairs from me, went to have his Aorta replaced, got that heart warming advertised corporate care; they’re giving him the surgery, but denying him the stay—while he lies in a coma. Dazed and confused, ‘Oh, ooo, wha, What the hell. Where, What, who?’ Hell is right! Once out of the coma, delirious, frail, with a hole in his throat to breathe, talk, and feed, he was shipped to the Westchester Regency Nursing Home to lay in dirty diapers and die by unnatural covid or hospital causes. If what doesn’t kill ya, it’ll make ya stronger…or crazy. 

Been munching on the American diet far too long, struck by COVID or some other disease, health failing with no insurance, or have the wrong supplemental plan? In a blink, you’re out the door of the emergency room and back home with an IV bag or oxygen tank by your side under the home care system before the anesthesia has worn off. —Maybe they didn’t even bother with the anesthesia. Did you check the box to affirm you will pay for its extended use?

Poor, weak, elderly, can’t make it out the door, and cost too much; they will exterminate you, grind your bones into powder to fill gel capsules to sell as nutritional supplements to increase vitality, virility, hormonal balance, or make face creams to prevent aging to increase their bottom line, while convincing you to give yourselves to science. 

My friend Susan, her mother frail and elderly, my friend Nancy’s mother, and my aunt too, are being warehoused in a drug induced stupor and waiting to be toe tagged!

Doctors, Congressmembers, State representatives, healthcare advocates, and seniors have been sounding the alarm on Medicare Advantage for years. In spite of this, Mayor Eric Adams is on the verge of forcing hundreds of thousands of City retirees onto this restrictive, and at times fatal, privatized health insurance plan. Retirees, who have been receiving Traditional Medicare since 1967, are at risk of losing their promised healthcare by an administration that cares more about enriching insurance companies than caring for the retired workers who built and supported this city.”—AMNY, Councilman Chris Marte, December 18, 2024

The Mayor and his sidekick Henry Garrido, Union Leader of DC 37, New York City’s largest union, have been fiercely pushing a corporate disadvantage plan. The retirees and advocates have unveiled their feelings quite openly to the disingenuous duo over the years, recently rallying outside a closed door meeting

For piss sake, let us retire with some dignity and peace, before we really get angry!

Despite the oppositional forces and the tenacious drive to do harm, Tuesday, December 17, 2024, was another win for the City’s service workers and retirees. NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees President Marianne Pizzitola, Legal Counsel Steve Cohen, and Councilmember Chris Marte spoke about the outcomes during a press conference.

“The City’s plan to defund retiree healthcare has now been analyzed by 13 different judges across all three levels of the state judiciary,” she [Marianne Pizzitola] said. “Every single judge—all 13 of them—have concluded that the City’s plan is unlawful. We once again call on the City and the Municipal Labor Committee, with the leadership of DC37, UFT, Sanitation, CWA Local 1180 and Teamsters Local 237 to end their ruthless and unlawful campaign to deprive retired municipal workers of the healthcare benefits they earned. …Constantly putting the elderly, disabled, line of duty widows/widowers and 9/11 responders through this is cruel and inhuman.—Work-bites, Steve Wishnia, December 19, 2024

“The court said what we’ve been arguing for the last three years, which is that the city has an obligation to pay for retirees’ Medicare supplemental insurance and it can’t Force retirees onto a Medicare Advantage plan.”—Steve Cohen

Besides being an unlawful campaign to force retirees into a private Medicare Advantage plan that limits access to doctors and regularly denies and delays coverage for care, why should we all get behind this fight to urge the Mayor to back off and beg the legislators to enshrine the retirees rights by passing Bill 1095-2024?

Well, the Mayor’s priorities are all wrong, you can’t trust him to build a proper budget or balance it. He is not listening to the Civil service retirees or the courts, and he’s spent an enormous amount of resources over the past three years to protect Aetna’s interest over the public’s. If this corporate deal is implemented, the $15 billion contract would be one of the largest in Aetna’s history.

Moreover, we need to be in solidarity; because the ruling class is stripping us down to our undies and leaving us without the basic human needs, and this effort is a stab (or maybe more of a pin prick) at corporate and governing collusion! 

Related Articles

Legislation

NYPD’s top cop is the latest to go down in scandal. What happens to him now?

Read More
Legislation

Major Bank Charged With Cheating Customers out of $2 Billion

Read More
Health, Legislation

MSCC Collected Letters Of Support For Chris Marte’s Health Care Bill 1096-2024

Read More

Make NYC a better place –
sign up for our newsletter!