Daily News Says De Blasio Wants Health Care Concessions In Return For Raises

But it's not really a raise if you get a 4% salary increase but have to pay 25% of your family's health care cost, is it?

In his high-stakes contract talks with city unions, Mayor de Blasio is pressing for healthcare savings in exchange for pay raises, the mayor’s budget director told the City Council on Wednesday.

“We’re going to treat the workforce with the respect that they have not been treated with, but at the same time protect the taxpayers and do something that’s affordable,” Dean Fuleihan said at the first hearing on de Blasio’s proposed $74 billion budget.

“There have to be offsetting savings. And (de Blasio) specifically mentioned and has repeatedly mentioned health savings.”

...

Fuleihan repeatedly stressed that saving money on the skyrocketing cost of health benefits would have to be part of any deal with the unions.

Health insurance for workers and retirees costs the city about $6 billion a year - and is projected to reach almost $7 billion by 2016 and nearly $8 billion by 2018.

“We need to find ways to control costs while providing high quality health care to our employees,” Fuleihan said. He refused to discuss specifics.

There are concession and then there are CONCESSIONS when it comes to these kinds of contract negotiations.

To my mind, this is not an acceptable CONCESSION:

The Citizens Budget Commission has estimated that the city could save $1.8 billion a year by requiring single employees to pay 10% of their insurance premiums, employees with families to pay 25% of their premiums, and early retirees to pay 50% of their premiums.

The DN says the unions are looking for other ways to work things out:

“We’re looking to sit down and see if we can come up with some ideas that can save everybody money,” said Harry Nespoli of the Municipal Labor Committee.

But he said he would resist making workers pay more for premiums, noting they already are responsible for co-pays.

“That’s going to be a problem. ... We want to make sure that whatever changes, the quality of the health care stays the same.”

We'll see how this goes.

All I know is, it's not really much of a raise when you get $4,000 extra a year in salary, but $3,000 of that goes toward paying health care premiums.