As a rehab counselor at Bellevue hospital, Lee Rottenberg said he declined a higher-paying management position because it meant losing city health benefits.

“I sacrificed [a] higher salary for a lower salary with health benefits at the end,” Rottenberg, who retired in 2006, said.

What You Need To Know

  • Retirees are opposing a deal from Mayor Eric Adams and District Council 37 that will move them off traditional Medicare

  • A bill in the City Council would require the city to keep retirees on traditional Medicare

  • DC37's executive director, Henry Garrido, opposes the Council bill, saying the shift saves the city $600 million a year, which will replenish a healthcare fund for retirees

Rottenberg on Monday rallied with fellow retired public workers in revolt against their old union over changes to their health benefits under a contract deal it cut with Mayor Eric Adams.

“It’s just incredulous the city is doing this,” Rottenberg said. “Our own union is doing this to us.”

The target of their ire, Henry Garrido, the executive director of District Council 37, the city’s largest municipal union.

The retirees’ complaint is that the proposed contract pulls retirees off traditional medicare into a private Medicare advantage plan from Aetna, an insurance company.

They say the deal will put them at risk of losing their longtime doctors, increasing their healthcare costs, and forcing them to get approval from the insurer for some tests and doctors’ visits.

“We realized when we looked into it was really a terrible plan,” Rottenberg said.

Aetna’s vice president for its group retiree solutions, Rick Frommeyer, defended the insurer’s plan in a statement to NY1, saying that it caps out-of-pocket costs to $1,500 a year and that 93% of New York City-area retirees on Aetna’s Medicare Advantage plan were satisfied with their ability to see their doctors.

Garrido - on Inside City Hall last week - defended the move for saving the city $600 million a year - money that then replenishes a healthcare fund for retirees.

“I don’t ever want to be in a position where I tell those retirees I don’t cover your cancer medication, as I do now, because the money run out, and we didn’t do the responsible thing to do,” Garrido said.

Retirees, who cannot vote in union elections, are backing a bill from Councilman Charles Barron that would preserve traditional medicare for retirees.

The bill united some of the council’s most conservative Republicans and most progressive Democrats to sponsor it.

A spokesman for Mayor Adams said the administration strongly opposes the legislation that if implemented would “create significant fiscal impacts for the city.”

The DC37 leader has threatened to pull political support from lawmakers who support it.

“This bill which has been proposed by Council Member Barron proposes that we continue to provide the services in perpetuity and doesn’t provide how to pay for those things and for that reason I call the bill the most irresponsible bill in the history of the council, since I’ve been here,” Garrido said.

To Marianne Pizzitola, who leads the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees, retirees deserve the benefits they were promised.

“We took jobs in the public sector because these jobs had the promise of pension and healthcare including Medicare,” she said before chants of “promises made, promises kept,” broke out.

The New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees is suing the city, Mayor Adams and other officials seeking to block the change from taking effect.