Not necessarily sunny

To the editor:

The lawsuit brought by retirees to preserve their current health-care benefits contains several

allegations. One is that the respondents, including city officials, the Office of Labor Relations and its commissioner “conspired with Aetna to unlawfully restrain competition with respect to Retiree health insurance.”

An additional colluder is arbitrator and mediator Martin Scheinman, who also serves as chair of the Tripartite Health Insurance Policy Committee.

In a September 2022 letter to the City Council, he cited a 2018 health savings agreement “empowering me with jurisdiction to determine an appropriate remedy” in the event of a dispute.

In an October 2022 letter from Labor Commissioner Renee Campion to Municipal Labor Committee Chair Harry Nespoli, obtained through a Freedom of Information request, she telegraphed that if the Council failed to act on an Administrative Code change, “…we will ask Marty Scheinman … to enforce the savings.”

In a follow-up letter, Campion reiterated that “we intend to request that Mr. Scheinman order immediate implementation of a Medicare Advantage plan,”

Finally, on Dec. 15, 2022, Scheinman issued an “Opinion and Award” selecting Aetna.

But as I indicated in a previous letter here, this intervention was inappropriate as there was no dispute — the City and the MLC had been trying for 18 months to force retirees into Medicare Advantage.

Scheinman has profited handsomely for his services. A Freedom of Information disclosure reveals that his firm sent invoices to OLR with billing at a minimum rate of $4,000 per day. The maximum was $7,500 per day — the cost of attending a Tripartite Committee meeting. The price tag for the opinion and award? $37,500.

I’m reminded of a Gershwin lyric: Nice work if you can get it / And if you get it / Won’t you tell me how?

Harry Weiner