In late June, the UFT withdrew its support for the city’s proposed Medicare Advantage plan for New York City’s Medicare-eligible retirees.

“The city’s losses in the courts and the needless anxiety created among retirees has made it clear to us that our support for this initiative cannot continue,” he wrote to UFT retirees in a June 23 email.

For nine years, he said, the UFT was able to work in partnership with the city to achieve savings while maintaining high-quality, premium-free health care. But over the past two years, he said, it became increasingly clear to the union that the city was no longer interested in being a partner in this approach.

“Our process is no longer collaborative; it is now adversarial,” Mulgrew wrote. “This administration has proven to be more interested in cutting their costs than honestly working with us to provide high-quality health care to the workers of this city and the retirees.”

Mulgrew said the UFT will now use its strength in the Municipal Labor Committee — the umbrella organization for all municipal unions that is responsible for bargaining health benefits — to push for a new strategy going forward.

At the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers in July, Mulgrew made the union’s first move to take its health care fight national. From the convention floor, he motivated a resolution to seek federal legislation to protect Medicare and expand Social Security benefits for seniors — and to ensure that these benefits would never be diminished.

“We’ve said for years we need federal intervention to protect all our health care benefits for both retirees and in-service members,” he wrote in an email to UFT retirees on July 24. “We can no longer wait for the federal government to do the right thing. We need to push for it, and the push starts with our retirees.”

The Republican Party’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project calls for the repeal of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which for the first time provides Medicare with the ability to directly negotiate the prices of certain single-source brand-name drugs. If this law is repealed, drug prices would rise and seniors across the country who are enrolled in Medicare Part D would lose out on $7.4 billion in savings next year. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision to strike down the Chevron doctrine threatens the federal government’s ability to ensure hospitals’ participation in the Medicare program.

“With so much at stake in the elections in November, Congress needs to lock in Medicare and Social Security benefits, and it needs to act now,” Mulgrew said.