2013
For me it is at times difficult to understand the short-sighted, uninformed and outright stupid ways people approach problems … and I guess I should add self-serving (although that I can understand except when self-serving is really self-defeating).
The following story says a lot; hey guys think Detroit, Chicago, Stockton, New Jersey and any number of municipalities struggling with generous health plans for government workers. You can also add General Motors and the USPS to that list.
Of course, they are not looking for cheaper insurance (another example of the insurance company myth as the cause of high health care costs), they are looking for a less expensive plan design that requires beneficiaries to pay more out of pocket and perhaps care a bit more what the care they receive costs. In fact, it is inconceivable that a group this size is not self-insured in the first place. However, as far as I can tell New York is one of four states that does not self-insure, so who knows?
Should the unions prevail, NYC will have escalating health care costs, waste money paying the Cadillac tax because of overly generous benefits and have one more nail in the coffin of financial failure … sounds like a plan. The unions in New York, Detroit and Chicago must be setting strategy together.
What they should be doing, of course, is sitting down and working out a strategy to do what needs to be done, not fighting tooth and nail to preserve what is not affordable. No doubt the masses of NYC will support the unions and their working members oblivious to the financial consequences.
After all, it’s all the fault of those damn insurance companies. If they would just cut executive pay we wouldn’t be in this mess … What mess?
Public Unions Fight New York’s Effort to Curb Health Costs
By KATE TAYLOR Published: August 9, 2013In his final months in office, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg set himself an ambitious goal: tackling New York’s rapidly rising health care costs by finding cheaper insurance for the city’s nearly 300,000 employees, 200,000 retirees and their families.
On Friday, his chances of accomplishing that appeared dimmer than ever.The Municipal Labor Committee, a coalition of unions that negotiates with the city on health benefits, filed a complaint against the city and obtained a temporary restraining order stopping the administration for now from seeking new coverage. A judge, in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, ordered the parties to appear in court on Aug. 20.
Since Mr. Bloomberg took office in 2002, the city’s annual health care costs have nearly doubled, to $6.3 billion. They are expected to keep rising in the next few years, potentially costing the city tens and eventually hundreds of millions of dollars under the so-called Cadillac tax, a provision of the Affordable Care Act that penalizes employers that offer expensive health coverage.
via Public Unions Fight New York’s Effort to Curb Health Costs – NYTimes.com.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
$6,000,000,000 a year, 500,000 employees and retirees, means an average of $12,000 per year per individual. Assuming half of the retirees are Medicare Eligible Supplements, with a cost of perhaps $4,000 each, that would raise the cost per employee and not-medicare eligible retiree to $14,000. Why not join with a few other cities and offer coverage through a multiemployer trust fund – so that the family Cadillac Tax limit would be the only one that applied… probably buying them a decade or more before triggering the tax?
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