It’s Time to Rebuild the Welfare Fund From the Ground Up

Why UFT Members Are Struggling While $850 Million Sits in Reserve

Every time a UFT member picks up a prescription and gets hit with a surprise copay—or finds out a life-sustaining drug isn’t covered—you can feel it: the system isn’t working the way it should.

Our Welfare Fund was created to ensure that public school educators and their families could afford basic care. But over time, that mission has been slowly chipped away. Behind the scenes, an invisible player has taken control of the system: the pharmacy benefit manager, or PBM.

Never heard of them? That’s by design. PBMs are third-party corporations hired to manage prescription drug benefits. They decide which drugs are covered, how much you pay, and which pharmacies you’re allowed to use. They’re supposed to negotiate lower prices—but in reality, they profit by marking up drug costs, pocketing rebates from drug companies, and steering patients toward their own affiliated pharmacies.

Translation: they make money when we spend more.

This is why you can be on the same medication for years and suddenly find it’s no longer covered—or why a generic drug at one pharmacy is five times the price at another. The rules change constantly, and members are left in the dark. And here’s the kicker: while all this is happening, our union quietly holds $850 million in Welfare Fund reserves. Nearly a billion dollars—just sitting there—while our members fight with PBMs to get the care they need. UFT Welfare Fund

This isn’t a funding crisis. It’s a vision crisis.

Imagine what we could do if we treated that reserve not as a rainy-day fund, but as fuel for transformation. We could immediately expand access to life-saving medications, eliminate tiered copays that punish people for needing the “wrong” drug, and invest in real support for mental health and chronic care. But that’s just the beginning.

We don’t have to go it alone. Right now, every city union negotiates its own separate drug plan. That’s like 50 people walking into a store and buying one bottle of aspirin each. If we came together—if the UFT joined forces with other city unions through a revitalized, unified Municipal Labor Committee—we’d have real leverage. Real bargaining power. With over a million covered lives between us, we’d be one of the largest buyers of prescription drugs in the country.

Other unions have already demonstrated the power of proactive, transparent healthcare management. SEIU 32BJ, for instance, directly contracted with high-quality, price-transparent providers and replaced their conflicted pharmacy benefit manager with a transparent alternative, ensuring that savings from drug manufacturers benefited the members directly. Similarly, UNITE HERE HEALTH established a member-run health plan that prioritizes care over corporate profits. In New York City, the PSC-CUNY Welfare Fund introduced a $0 generic copay program and a high-cost prescription reimbursement fund, helping members manage out-of-pocket expenses without sacrificing access to vital medications.

And we can go even further. Drug prices in the U.S. are outrageous—often 2 to 10 times higher than what patients pay in Canada for the same medication. Municipalities across the country have begun partnering with international mail-order programs like CANARX, which offers FDA-approved generics at dramatically reduced prices. Schenectady, NY has used it. Montgomery County, Maryland has too. At this time, there’s no reason we shouldn’t explore this option for NYC.

The only reason we haven’t pursued these options is because no one in power has been willing to challenge the status quo. We are.

This campaign is about more than winning an election. It’s about demanding that our union work for us. That it stops managing decline and starts organizing for power. That it stops hoarding resources and starts investing in the health, dignity, and security of every UFT member.

We don’t need another task force. We need courage. We need solidarity—not just across job titles or boroughs, but across unions. We need a Welfare Fund that actually fulfills its purpose: to take care of us.

We already know how to fight for our students. It’s time we fought just as hard for each other.

To learn more on Pharmacy Benefit Managers: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-brief-look-at-current-debates-about-pharmacy-benefit-managers/