There's one small bit of good news for Detroit workers as the city attempts to skirt bankruptcy.
Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s team says cuts to employee and retiree health coverage may be backfilled with Medicare and programs created by the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, including health insurance exchanges.
This is, of course, a primary goal of health insurance reform: Let employers shed costly health care liabilities.
Arguably, employers have reason to fund programs that keep employees healthy and productive. Retiree health care, however, is little more than largesse.
Detroit can no longer afford to be so generous. The money just isn’t there. At the same time, no human being with any modicum of basic decency actually wants to see people stranded without health care.
It’s easy to imagine public employees as that gaping jerk giving you the runaround in the city permits office. But let’s not forget that these cuts also will affect police officers, fire fighters and garbage collectors, without whom no city could survive.
It would be obscene if a person who risked his life keeping the rest of us safe for 30 years were told that, you know, there’s a free clinic down the street. Especially while the well-heeled amongst us demand ever more property tax abatements and Live Midtown! subsidies.
There’s also a societal cost to the uninsured or underinsured. They tend to rely on expensive emergency room services for their health care needs. All of us ultimately bear those costs.
If Detroit restructures its health care in a way that lowers legacy costs while effectively letting retirees and workers maintain a comparable level of coverage through the patchwork of Obamacare, it may be an overhead-trimming model for other public and private sector employers.
Perhaps such a success can be the nail in the coffin of the ridiculous caterwauling about “socialized medicine.”
No less a free market thinker than economic Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek saw the legitimacy of a national health insurance system that protects all citizens back in the 1940s. Even Margaret Thatcher defended Britain’s (actual, literal socialist) National Health Service. Yet, America (f#$% yeah!) continues to stand on the false notion that universal health care will destroy the free market capitalist system as we know it.
In truth, health care has been damned expensive for public and private sectors in the pre-Obamacare system.
It also created an incalculable opportunity cost. Everytime someone decided he or she couldn’t leave a steady job to try a business venture because, well, what if the kid got sick, an opportunity for innovation was lost. One’s ability to take risks often depends on one’s placement on Maslow’s hierarchy.
Ironically, so much of the anger over national health care comes from those seniors who just want their country back while taking advantage of Medicare.
That widely popular government program practices a form of age discrimination that probably no other health care insurer could ever get away with legally. Actually, given that seniors health care needs make them among the most expensive cohort to insure, no insurer would want a coverage pool that only includes seniors.
It’s fundamentally stupid that seniors 65 and older can take advantage of this public health care option while every other American has been told told essentially to go suck an egg.
If Obamacare can prove itself a solution to employer legacy costs, while providing workers and retirees with a more stable insurance system, then the program should be revised to include the universal public option initially envisioned.
And if there is an added public cost for such a program, then let the government cut command-economy programs like the subsidies to industrial corn farmers, aircraft carriers requested by pork-gobbling shipyard-in-the-district Congressmen rather than the Pentagon, and small town airports next to perfectly good highways connected to international airports. You know, government spending that actually burdens our free market capitalist system.
