ALBANY COUNTY — Governor Kathy Hochul has rejected a bill passed unanimously in the state legislature that would have prevented the state from reducing benefits for retired public employees, who are currently giving up substantial skilled-nursing-care coverage when they turn 65. 

All public retirees are obligated to enroll in Medicare once they’re eligible, according to the bill and, in so doing, they give up 100 days of nursing coverage, and are subject to a new three-day prior hospitalization requirement.

The bill states that active public employees and retirees not yet enrolled in Medicare currently receive 120 days of nursing-home care with no prior hospitalization requirement. 

A memo from the governor accompanying the veto — which rejected a suite of bills relating to public-employee salaries and benefits, many specific to law enforcement — states that she’s concerned about cost when the budgets of school districts and local governments are already strained. 

Estimating the cost of the suite of bills at $361 million in the short-term and $1.4 billion in the long term, Hochul wrote, “Fixed costs associated with these benefit enhancements would hinder the ability of local governments to function effectively and would negatively impact the state’s overall economic competitiveness. 

“These costs,” she went on, “must be addressed in the context of the annual budget negotiations where they can be analyzed with other State spending, including spending to assist localities, rather than as standalone bills that do not have an accompanying appropriation and are not considered in the context of the State’s current or future financial plan or their impact on local governments.”

State Senator Neil Breslin, who sponsored the skilled-nursing bill and is chairman of the Senate Insurance Committee, told The Enterprise that the cost for that bill specifically would be in the neighborhood of $10 million. 

Local school districts are already bracing for rising costs of retiree benefits, with both Guilderland and Berne-Knox-Westerlo noting those costs in October following audit releases. 

Guilderland, this year, has a liability of $248 million for post-retirement future benefits, which is up from a 2018 actuarial estimate of $175 million. 

BKW, a much smaller school, has a liability of $91.8 million, which board member Nate Elble said encompasses costs as far out as 2075. 

“It’s not just school districts, it’s municipalities as well,” BKW School Board President Matt Tedeschi said. 

But fiscal prudence is little relief to those who are without benefits as robust as they once had, at a time when they’re the most likely to need them. 

Retired BKW teacher and Berne resident Helen Lounsbury, who is 83, said she’s disappointed that the legislation didn’t go through. 

“It causes anxiety,” she said, referring to the reduced benefits. 

She noted that something similar had happened under former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned last year, when he dissolved the “Cadillac plan” that Lounsbury was on because only 1,000 people in the state were on it. 

Lounsbury said she had called Cuomo’s office about it because she was so bothered by the decision and by the governor’s justification, which she considered weak. 

“I’d had personal experience, because my husband died of cancer …,” she said. “He had excessive treatments and everything else that goes along with cancer, and our total bill for all those years was under $200. You can imagine, if we hadn’t had the coverage, what it would have been.”

So, Lounsbury said, when she saw that Hochul failed to protect retirees’ health benefits, she was “pretty upset, because the coverage we have as retirees is not equivalent to what I retired with.”

For instance, Lounsbury said, she used to not have a copay, but now does. 

Advocate groups are dismayed, too, but have promised to keep fighting.

Diana Hinchcliff, a Rensselaerville resident who is president of the Retired Public Employees Association, which lobbied for the bill, told The Enterprise that the group is “disappointed about the veto,” and called it “age discrimination.”

“This means that some 225,000 state and local government retirees enrolled in Medicare and the New York State Health Insurance Program’s Empire Plan are denied the same coverage for skilled-nursing care as other Empire Plan enrollees,” she said. 

“RPEA will work with the legislature to include this essential benefit in next year’s state budget,” Hinchcliff said. 

Breslin also said that he would continue to push the issue from the legislative side. 

“You double up if you still think you’re right,” he said. “You double up your efforts, and you question the numbers that are given to you … It’s a work in progress, but you don’t take losses and just walk away with your tail between your legs.

“You try to say, ‘Why was it vetoed, and how can I accommodate the governor’s office to make it acceptable to retired public employees, who really, to me, are disadvantaged by reaching the Medicare age in terms of long-term care?’”