With out insurance coverage change, Council ought to discover new option to save – New York Day by day Information

Within the newest twist in a long-running saga, a invoice to alter metropolis legislation to permit the Adams administration to start charging insurance coverage premiums to retirees who decide to not transfer right into a new Medicare Benefit plan seems to be lifeless. Adams might but attempt to ax the unique Medicare program to go away solely the brand new one standing, although that’s a much less perfect resolution to letting the packages coexist.

Positive, then, if the proposal is so anathema to Council members, they need to have to elucidate how precisely they plan to replenish the Well being Insurance coverage Stabilization Fund. Let’s do not forget that the $600 million in annual financial savings that Medicare Benefit was purported to generate have been to be reinvested into the fund, which itself serves some essential functions, amongst them supplementing dental, imaginative and prescient and prescription drug protection for present metropolis employees.

The fund hasn’t precisely been well-managed, and is burning by means of money quicker than it might probably replenish it even with out wrongheaded strikes to make use of it as a piggy financial institution for unrelated functions like wage will increase, which has left it close to insolvency. This can be a predicament so foreseeable that the Residents Funds Fee was particularly warning about it way back to 2011.

Now, town’s dealing with an unsure fiscal image, and whereas there are extra avenues for the mayor to search out financial savings, like reining in extra time, issues received’t shake out if the cost-cutting measures he’s putting in are blocked by a Council that isn’t in a rush to supply concepts of its personal. At a second when town is having hassle attracting and retaining expertise, torpedoing a fund designed to help low-cost entry to medical care — one of many advantages that draws folks to public service — looks like a quite poor thought.

As funds negotiations get stepping into earnest, as a substitute of arising with new methods to spend, how in regards to the Metropolis Council placing some concepts on the desk to make sure the viability of the stabilization fund and your entire metropolis’s funds?