NYPD Through The Looking Glass

NYPD Retiree Emblem/GHI Doctor & Dental Information

• Vic Ferrari

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 18:14
SPEAKER_00

Bill Mack is a retired NYPD sergeant and runs the NYPD retiree emblem, GHI doctor and dental information Facebook page. The site was created to facilitate the exchange of doctors who accept GHI and emblem healthcare outside the New York City area for NYPD retirees and families. Bill has also started Healthcare for Heroes, a GoFundMe page to raise money to fight a lawsuit that would strip health benefits for retired NYPD members living outside the New York City area. Bill, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01

Hi, how are you?

SPEAKER_00

I'm doing great, Bill. Bill, just introduce yourself. Tell our listeners a little something about yourself and your career.

SPEAKER_01

Well, basically, uh I came out of the Academy in 93 and I went to the 6-1 precinct. I stayed there for a little bit, did anti-crime, uh, went to street crime for a few months, and then everyone was sent back to commands. So I wound up back in the 6-1 squad. I did the Ram thing first, and then I went to the squad. And then uh from there I spent some time in the 7-0, and then I'm when I was finally promoted to sergeant, I wound up in the 5-2 precinct where I finished out my career as a Bronx. Yes. Brooklyn and the Bronx, my whole career.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I'm a former Bronx. When you said the 5-2, my ears popped up. I don't know Brooklyn all that well. When were you active? From what years?

SPEAKER_01

93 to 93 to 20 uh 2009, when I was surveyed off the job because I had surgery on my hand and I wound up having a heart attack, so I got the heartbill during the surgery.

SPEAKER_00

Bill, you've done so much good work for NYPD members. Can you can you go into a little about how you got involved running the NYPD retiree GHI emblem and doctor dental information Facebook page? Sure.

SPEAKER_01

Well, about seven years ago, eight years ago now. I'm not even sure when we started it. It's been so long. I was living in Florida, and you know, we all had the GHI Emblem Plan, the CBP actually. This emblem, it was called the Emblem CBP, which stands for Comprehensive Benefits Plan. It's the same plan you have in New York, but out of state, the problem was that no one wanted to take it because of the low payouts for out-of-state doctors. There was also a problem with payments and renewing doctors that left the plan. Emblem was basically not res uh was not uh allowing new doctors to join the plan. So I reached out to my 1013 clubs and the RSA and I got the runaround from everyone. Gene Lowry, who used to run from the 1013 club, he told me, he says, well, you know, you moved out of New York, so it's kind of your problem. So now that kind of ticked me off. So I started uh the what do you call it a group and it kind of took off. We were helping people find doctors around the state, because sometimes we had to travel. Like my daughter and my wife would have to go all the way to Miami, which is pretty much a four-hour drive from where we are, to go see a gynecologist. So it was getting kind of ridiculous. And then there was other doctors we just couldn't find. We have to go back to New York for it. So we started this page and we got a few other MOSs to join as uh moderators to help us out when answering questions. And then the next thing you know, we're up to 8,000 people. And then the whole thing with the Medicare came to light. And uh we we initiated the original lawsuit before other people wanted to go a different direction, and we stepped back from it. We continued a separate group for Medicare retirees, and we still do that to this till uh today, actually. We just helped a couple of people today, assist them with picking out Medicare and how to get involved and how to get the reimbursement. Most people didn't even know you have an annual Part B reimbursement or an Irma reimbursement. And uh we helped the people with their paperwork and uh we asked quite you know, we answer questions for them, and it's all done on a volunteer basis. We don't take money, we don't take gifts, and if we do get gifts, we donate them to the widows and children's funds. That's just the way we want it. We we want to keep away from uh looking like we're doing this for profit when we're not. We don't want that. We want to help other cops out because they need the help. Then um we had that whole escalated thing with the with the originally with the Medicare plan when uh my wife used to work for Aetna, so she was in charge of the New York City accounts before she retired over 20 years ago. And uh she was able to help people on uh let us know what was going on. Originally, Emblem was going to do the Medicare Advantage plan, but it was a horrible plan. It would have been out-of-pocket expenses for us, through the roof, high deductibles, high co-payments, and it just wasn't feasible. So I started making us think about it. The unions told me to keep it down, they would handle it, blah, blah, blah. They didn't do anything about it. So we just kept putting the word out there. Eventually, they folded the whole emblem plan. And then everybody had a choice still of the Aetna plan or traditional Medicare with the GHI senior care um to cover the mental portion of your bill, which is the 20%. Medicare would cover the original 80%. And that was all fine and good. We let that go, people were still happy again, and then uh we focused more on the non-Medicare retirees, which is the the new NYCE PPO plan. We pushed and pushed and pushed, and we didn't let them relax at it. I'd show up for meetings, I'd ask questions, I told people what was going on, and finally they did the negotiations and they came up with this new plan. Now, this plan is different from the other plans as the city pays off the bills, kind of like when you go to the doctor for a line of duty injury. They'll pay the bills and uh the they pay United Healthcare a processing while management fee, basically, and to process complaints. They do the same thing with emblem for city residents, and uh it's it's been a much better plan since the city the city's paying the direct doctors directly, they're making more money, and we have access now to the United Healthcare Doctor Base, which is probably the largest doctor base in the country. It's the provider it's uh preferred provider plan by United Health. And since we've gotten this new plan, we actually have coverage. We we don't have to drive drive miles or or fly back to New York. I mean, it's been pretty much great for us. And now all of a sudden, this new group comes out of nowhere called Hands Off My Healthcare or whatever they're called, and we found out that they were funded by Anthem. Anthem is, I guess, disgruntled because they lost the contract in that round of negotiations, and they're no longer getting the four billion dollars or so that they were getting a year to handle our hospitalization part of our original healthcare. So they recruited these people who are basically political activists, and they got a $2,000 an hour attorney and a public media influencer group to push the videos that they're putting out. But then we noticed that the people doing the videos are all on Medicare. This doesn't even apply this so this plan doesn't even apply to them. It applies to the Medicare people 65 and older. This applies to the people that aren't on Medicare yet, retired, and it also applies to our families and for active MOS. We have things now before before like we didn't have before, like access to psychiatrists and stuff like that. And giving our profession, I think that comes in pretty handy right now with the you know the suicide rate and everything else, and people still suffering from PTSD from 9-11. It's it's been a one it's been a godsend, to be honest with you, this new plan. And we can't afford to uh let them take this plan away from us. So against my better judgment, I realized I'm gonna have to to form a what do you call it, uh go fund me. And I hired Louis Lombardi, who's a retired captain from the job, who's doing the case pro bono for us. So basically all the funds that were recruited are all in the account, nobody's touched a dime from it. This is all gonna go to Louis's uh filing fees and court fees since he's doing the case pro bono for us. We went to court once and we won. Now we're going to court a second time, and then they filed another appeal yesterday for the original thing, the uh original case that we won. They want to try to bring it back again, and they got rid of Wanda Williams, who is the original petitioner. Now she's no longer on the case from what I understand from now. She used to run, she's big with DC 37. She used to run OTB till it went out of business. She's a big political activist herself. As well as the other people on the original board who are all over 65. So it makes no sense. They don't even have cause to file this lawsuit. There's been no access on their social media other than us complaining to them to stop their nonsense. And uh and then like I said, they have the one of the best lawyer firms in Manhattan. It is what it is at this point. So we're gonna fight for every everything we can get we deserve. We fought for this, we got the plan we needed, we deserve this plan. We're all dying every day. We have stuff that's not being treated by World Trade Center benefits and stuff, and it's just we just need this care. It's you know, we're desperate for it. And that's pretty much it in a nutshell. I don't think I miss much.

SPEAKER_00

Well, I so I I'll give you my version. I retired in 2007. I moved down to Florida for the first 12 years. Everybody took my insurance. Like I I'd call up a doctor, plan, do you take your yeah, yeah, come on in. Then probably about four or five years ago, there was a shift where I'd go on the GHI website, they'd point me to a doctor, I'd call the doctor up and they'd go, What are you kidding? We don't take that anymore. And it would be an all-day thing to find a doctor. And I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on, and it seemed like a shell game designed to frustrate the hell out of people. And then, you know, it it would take me, it would, it would take me days to find a doctor. And and as a result of your hard work, you know, retired members living outside the New York City area ha have access to to medical treatment. But the question I got to ask, Bill, is why does the PBA, DEA, SBA, LBA unions, why aren't they more proactive to ensure why retired NYPD members living outside of New York City have access to adequate health care?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I know I honestly I really don't know why. I've when I first started this whole group, I heard from Errol Ogman, who's the administrator for the health funds for the SBA. And basically, he tried to be nice and blah, blah, blah, you know, reassure me, we'll take care of it, he'll take care of it. And then nothing happened. And then after a while, I started getting uh messages from uh calm it down, don't spend good give him so much information. And I was like, I didn't understand why the car why the big uh hush-hush on everything. We need to know, you know, we need this health care. It seemed like they just didn't care. And the same with the RSA. I talked to Bobby, I talked to Patsy, and even Larry, who was temporarily running it for like a couple of months or whatever his term was, and nobody cares. They they just don't care. I got I don't know if it's because they're all on Medicare and it doesn't affect them. But I know that uh they just passed a law where uh you can retire at 65 now, so I guess the people at the unions are gonna retire when they're 65 and go straight on Medicare. So this non-Medicare plan doesn't affect them. They still get good emblem care in New York because the majority of doctors in New York still accept it, but they don't accept it out of state anymore. And we can't get people to we can't even get doctors to register it. It took me a year and a half to get a guy, and we lost him after a month when he first got he got paid for his first PAPSMIA and he got paid four dollars for it. So then he dropped it. It took us a year and a half to get one guy in the college, isn't it? Boom, it took us less than 30 days to lose him.

SPEAKER_00

And it it amazes me with this lawsuit that you said the insurance company is behind it, and they're finding straw men to prop it up and come after it yet again.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, it is. It's sad. It's one whole big shell game. It's but it's a four billion dollar contract, and they want that contract back. It's all about the money.

SPEAKER_00

There's also a lawsuit against New York City regarding 9-11 first responders. Can you go into that a little bit?

SPEAKER_01

I'm not really uh a part of that lawsuit. Uh that's another group doing it. It just I'm just one person. I have a few volunteers working with me, and we have a single lawyer. It's we just can't do all of this. I know a little bit about the lawsuit, and it's something that we need. It has to be taken care of because ever since Sedgwick took over, we've been having problems with getting care, with denials and treatments not being included. It's you get a lot of runarounds from and I can tell you one thing, over the years, the testing has definitely degraded. They've taken stuff away from us. It's not as, I guess, as precise as it was before. It's you're you're in and out in an hour, they take an x-ray, a breathing test, blah, blah, blah, blah. Have a nice day, see you next year. But when you need to be treated, you get to run around for months. I like myself, I need to speak I I take a breathing operation, or not a breathing operation, but a nasal spray. And I've been trying to fight for six months to get the nasal spray. After being on it for 13 years, all of a sudden I can't get it anymore. So, you know, that's part of the problem with Sedgwick. But as far as that lawsuit, uh, we're not part of it. And we're just we're over our heads doing what we're doing right now. I mean we're really we're only a couple of people and we're doing what we can, you know.

SPEAKER_00

What's the what's what's the name of the GoFundMe page where NYPD men or anybody for that matter wants to contribute to this law to fight this lawsuit? Um Healthcare for Heroes? Healthcare for Heroes on. I'll have the link up on this episode. That would be great. Bill, I I I I know you're retired from the job, and you know, I appreciate everything you do. And I but running that NYPD Facebook GHI emblem page looks like it's a full-time job.

SPEAKER_01

We get every day we wake up, we wake up to either emails or missed calls or Facebook notifications, and we wake up in the morning. Me, my wife and I, we just knock them out the best we can. We get a lot of help, especially from one of our moderators named Pete D. He's a retired sergeant as well. And uh the other moderators, Elise and and Carell and Donna, who Donna's just been overwhelmed with her work as a real estate agent, and she hasn't really been able to help as much as she used to. I mean, we all have lives on the side, so everybody pitches in whenever they can, and we do what we can. That's all we can do at this point, you know. We take other volunteers, people other people offer to help, and uh we take them up on it. And we we ask that, you know, if you want to help, just reach out. We can use all the help we can get on it. But it's been eight years of me and my wife's life.

SPEAKER_00

Bill, uh also just uh It's a lot. I just I go on there quite a bit and I just I'm like, this these poor people, I've reached out to you with questions before, and it's like you got 8,000 people on this site all wanting to know something about their health benefits, and I'm sure it can get crazy. Bill, just a side note, you've you're an author like myself. Can can you please tell us a little something about your books and where our our listeners can check them out? Sure.

SPEAKER_01

Uh in my spare time, I just I don't know, I just started writing one day. Uh my wife has been ill. She has a brain aneurysm right now. And uh so she's been resting a lot. She falls asleep early. So one night I picked up my uh my children, my kids' old iPad from high school, and I started fiddling on it. I started writing a story. And uh it it started off, it's uh fictional. It's uh called it's in the disaster fiction category, and it's about uh Chinese taking over, uh well hitting us with an EMP, an electric magnetic electromagnetic uh bomb. And it basically wipes out anything with a computer trip. So would there be no electric, etc. All for uh all basically utilities would fail, cars wouldn't work, and uh I wrote a story about Chinese hitting us with one of them and then taking over and attacking New York City. They're basically attacking the whole country, but I focused my part of my book on my books on New York City and New Jersey area. And we make references to NYPD. We use locations like 1PP, City Hall, how City Hall was taken over, the City Council and the Mayor were all taken prisoner. I don't know, people seem to like it. And it's it's done pretty well. It's rated pretty high. It's rated like a 4.8 or a 4.7 on Goodreads for all of them. So people seem to like them. I've done three books. I'm coming out with a fourth soon. I'm finishing it up now. I didn't like the way the ending came out, so I'm gonna keep going with it as long as people like it. And then I came up with another book for my friend Larry Marquino, whose father was on the job. He was a 6'1 MOS. He's actually the reason I became a cop. He talked to me one day, I was working at Khan Edison, and we started talking about police work, and next thing you know, I'm taking the police and the fire department test and chose a police department. Larry, anyway, was involved in a ski accident last year in Utah and uh he became paralyzed. He's been fighting and it's been it's been cost of you know, pretty expensive for the family and everything. So I wrote a book called Gore Mountain. It's a crypto crypto zoologist book. Basically, it's a fictional book about Bigfoot and tracking some skiers in Gore Mountain, New York. And we based it on a ski trip we took in uh right after graduating high school. And you know, of course we changed the names and stuff, but there's a lot of references to places in Brooklyn and stuff like that, and people seem to like it. So I just left it out there and I'm donating all proceeds from that book to my friend Larry in his recovery.

SPEAKER_00

What are the names of your books and and where can we and they're on Amazon?

SPEAKER_01

Yes, they're on Amazon, they're on uh Kim uh Kindle Unlimited, you could buy uh the soft covers, you know, paperbacks, and you could also uh if you don't have Kindle Unlimited, I think the fee was $3.99. They're originally published to Ravathon, but I'm no longer going through them. It just got too expensive. So uh I've been publishing everything myself lately. It's easier. And uh they're all available that way. And uh like I said, uh the last book, all the proceeds go to uh my friend Larry Marquino. I haven't decided what I'm gonna do with the proceeds from the other book yet, they're still sitting in the account. I'm probably gonna donate them to something when I figure out what to. The titles of the books are called The Without Warning Saga, and each individual nominal has been named Target New York City, Target New York City 2, and the third one was Target New Jersey. And the Bigfoot book is called Gore Mountain.

SPEAKER_00

Bill, on behalf of myself and every retired NYPD member living outside of New York City area, I want to thank you for everything you're doing for us.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you for putting me on the show, and I appreciate you giving me some air time so we can get the word out. So people know what's going on. There's not been the unions haven't told anybody that there's a lawsuit, there's a chance we could lose the new plan. And you putting it out there and helping us spread the word about it really means a lot to me. I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and I I'll post, I'll post the links to the uh GoFundMe page where you could you can support us, try to fight this lawsuit that's trying to strip away our our health care benefits. I'll also post the links to Bill's books on the bottom of this episode. Bill, again, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you, Vic. And you have a great day now. You take care of yourself.

SPEAKER_00

As always, I'd like to thank everyone for tuning in, especially my listeners in Edmonton, Alberta, Westfield, New Jersey, Casagrande, Arizona, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Glasgow City, Glasgow. If you worked in law enforcement and had an interesting criminal background, please drop me a note on Twitter or Instagram at VicFerrari50. If you're watching on YouTube, please hit the like and subscribe buttons. If you enjoy the content, check out my Amazon author page. Just type in my name, Vic, Ferrari Like the Car, where you can preview all my NYPD books for free. Thanks again, everyone, and I'll have another episode out later this week.