Bill Kadereit, President, NRLN

A November 19, 2023 article in The Register reported that George Adomavicius, who worked for IBM for 42 years before retiring in October 2020, has personally filed a lawsuit against his former employer claiming its recent healthcare benefit changes represents age discrimination.

Adomavicius chose to sue on his own rather than hiring an expensive lawyer, “To correct a wrong.” 

The alleged wrong is the employee benefits transition that IBM announced on September 14, 2022. The corporation shifted medical coverage for Medicare-eligible IBM retirees to a new IBM-sponsored Medicare Advantage program run by UnitedHealthcare, as of January 1, 2023.

As The Register previously reported, IBM’s health benefits transition angered some retirees because it withheld Health Reimbursement Arrangement/Account (HRA) subsidies – credited to retirees during their time at the company – from anyone who refused to select one of the two new Medicare Advantage plans and preferred to retain their traditional Medicare supplement plan.

Steve Bergeron, another former IBM employee, started a petition to convince the company to let retirees choose their healthcare plans without forcing the issue by denying HRA funds. He managed to collect more than 3,500 signatures though ultimately gave up, according to The Register article.

NRLN President Bill Kadereit told The Register that the NRLN has been involved in a similar health benefits transition with Tennessee Valley Authority retirees. After trying to convince the State of Tennessee and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which administers Medicare, to intervene, the NRLN is seeking a statutory remedy with Congress.

The article reported that Kadereit argued this state of affairs is being allowed to happen by Congress to avoid tough decisions about how to deal with spiraling healthcare costs. And business accounts departments like it because there’s profit to be made.

“What Congress was trying to do is privatize Medicare. And the way they do that is to subsidize the insurance companies to put them in a market advantage, thus cannibalizing their own plan Medicare.

“And now Medicare Advantage plans have a 54 percent market share and their incurred cost per enrollee is nine percent higher than the old fee for service costs. So what Congress is doing is avoiding having to talk about taxes because it affects electability.”

Click here to read the article in The Register.