Ed Asner and other SAG-AFTRA members sue over cuts to union health care plan

The SAG-AFTRA plan has around 33,000 participants, but only two-thirds will continue to receive the benefits promised as a result of the cuts, according to the lawsuit. The changes to the plan also significantly increased the pay threshold for eligibility for health care coverage and eliminated the SAG plan’s previous practice of providing secondary health care coverage to participants with 20 years of credit. pension acquired, according to the lawsuit.

Click here to read the complaint.

Residue – the money earned from replaying past work – is a major source of income for veterans of the entertainment industry. But under the recently announced cuts, residual income earned by members 65 and older will no longer count towards the plan’s new minimum coverage eligibility if those members receive a union pension. And these plan members must still contribute to the plan based on their residuals at the same rate as younger members.

For those who continue to be covered by the plan, insurance premiums will increase dramatically when they take effect next year, the plaintiffs said. For example, a participant with two or more beneficiaries will pay nearly $ 750 per quarter, up from $ 375 previously. The changes affect all performers, including professional stunt performers, voice actors, backups and dancers.

A spokesperson for the directors of SAG-AFTRA told NBC News in a statement: “We have just received a copy of the complaint filed this afternoon and are in the process of reviewing it.”

When announcing the benefit cuts, administrators told attendees they were the result of rising healthcare costs and coronavirus-related production shutdowns that have devastated the entertainment industry.

But many members don’t buy it. Actors Whoopi Goldberg, Morgan Freeman, Shirley Jones, Mark Hamill, Martin Sheen and other affected SAG-AFTRA members joined Asner in the video, expressing their outrage at the cutbacks in healthcare benefits that will affect them as well. than so many of their ranks. classify colleagues and denounce the union leadership which caused the cuts.

“I have contributed to the health plan for my entire career,” Goldberg said in the video. “I’m really pissed off about this. Really pissed off.”

Carol Kane also appeared saying, “This is obscene”.

The SAG Health Plan was created in 1960 to provide health coverage to all members of the Screen Actors Guild. To fund the health care and pension plans, all of SAG’s performers gave away their television scraps for films made before 1960. Now, some of the same artists who gave up that revenue are being removed from coverage. health under diet changes, the lawsuit told me.

“I think of seniors who have paid into the health care plan their entire careers,” said Frances Fisher. “They were promised lifetime coverage if they were acquired; that promise was broken. Now, where will a 70-year-old stuntman find work because their residues no longer count?”

The SAG and AFTRA unions merged to form SAG-AFTRA in 2012. Problems with the SAG-AFTRA health plan began in 2017, the lawsuit says, when the administrators of the SAG health plan approved a merger with the AFTRA plan. . For years, the SAG plan had higher contribution rates than the AFTRA plan, according to the lawsuit.

Shortly after the health plan merged, according to the lawsuit, administrators learned that the combined plan’s financial structure was unsustainable, but did not notify participants.

The lawsuit argues that administrators had two years to solidify the health plan without “dramatically ending SAG-AFTRA health coverage for predominantly older participants.” For example, negotiations of three recent union contracts could have allocated more funds to the health plan, some members said.

The plaintiffs in this case are Steve Schwartz and Robert Kriner, Jr. of Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith. In a statement to NBC News, they said the lawsuit seeks to restore health insurance coverage for all SAG members and to hold plan trustees accountable.

SAG members were told that the health plan merger in 2017 “would strengthen the overall financial health of the SAG plan while ensuring comprehensive benefits for all participants,” the lawyers said. “In fact, the disastrous merger has resulted in the loss of health coverage for thousands of elderly SAG artists, their spouses and children, in the midst of a pandemic.”

The approval by the trustees of the merger of the two plans in 2017 violated federal law because they did not prioritize the interests of participants, according to the lawsuit, an obligation under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 .

For example, the trustees did not conduct a thorough analysis of the impact the merger would have on participants before it happened, said Edward Siedle, a pension expert and lawyer who conducts medical investigations. legal provisions on pensions in difficulty.

“Health care plan mergers raise complex issues, can create serious problems and conflicts, and can result in lost benefits for members,” Siedle, who works for the plaintiffs in the case, said at NBC News. “In this case, there was no such report and no full and fair disclosure that would have allowed SAG and AFTRA members to intelligently assess the likely negative impact on members’ health benefits. . “

The lawsuit against the SAG-AFTRA trustees follows another lawsuit in 2017 against supervisors at the American Federation of Musicians and the Employers’ Pension Fund. This case centered on allegations of inappropriate investments made by the pension, which was underfunded, and was brought by the same lawyers representing the SAG-AFTRA plaintiffs.

This case was settled in October with $ 18.3 million paid into the pension fund by insurers for the defendants. Two of the SAG-AFTRA administrators prosecuted on Tuesday were also accused in the case.