Detroit has gone bankrupt. Untold misery will be inflicted by bankers and creditors upon the residents, civil servants and small businesses of this incredible city. It didn't have to be this way, and it doesn't have to be as painful as the media elites are foreshadowing.
Remember that health care takes up nearly 20 percent -- 20 percent! -- of this nation's GDP. That excess is in the form of economic rent -- really, unearned and undeserved profits -- that overpaid specialist doctors, health insurance corporations, and for-profit hospitals suck out of the collective American wallet each and every day.
So, pensioners will be told that they need to go without benefits in their old age and rely, instead, on a Medicare system that is great, but needs improvements and patient cost-sharing caps. City employees will lose good insurance and be forced to accept, if anything, the latest, high-deductible garbage plan from Aetna that will bankrupt them the minute their child falls seriously ill.
For the same reason, that auto manufacturers have, in many cases, avoided setting up shop in America because of the astronomical cost of health care -- ask Detroit's other bankruptcy, GM, about this one -- America's municipalities, like all of us, are the financial victims of a uniquely perverse health care system that is unsustainable and cruel.
Imagine, for a second, if health care was financed, instead of the irrational system we now have, by progressive income and payroll taxes directed towards a single, national insurance pool. Yes, a single-payer of all medical bills in America, perhaps an improved version of Medicare. Imagine the weight this would take off of municipalities. Imagine the freedom our cities would have to invest in what really matters: education, culture, promoting small business.
But, no, that won't happen, because America is incapable of doing big things anymore. We're not FDR's country, we're incrementalist cowards scared of upsetting the most overpaid corporate executives in the world, health insurance CEOs. We won't save America's cities, because saving the unearned wealth of the billionaires is more important than saving the homes and livelihoods of millions.
We won't solve this crisis of municipal budgeting with single-payer health care, but, well, we could.