Better Hospitals for a Sick City

Some years ago, I worked as a freelance writer for a publisher in Detroit, Michigan, and every year, Id be invited out to the home office for a few days to have a little face time and to hang with my virtual colleagues. This was the first time I ever got to witness firsthand the depressing squalor that defines the Motor City.

Now, I hail from the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. For the length of my childhood, I got to witness the slow, sad decline of Bethlehem Steel. I remember the day the plant finally shut down. I remember driving past the rusting facility. And I remember more recently how depressed I was that the only redevelopment the old industrial site could gain was a new casino. Believe me, a gambling institution is the last thing the people of any economically depressed community need. I dont care what the PR flacks of the gaming industry say otherwise.

So I know what its like to see a citys fortunes fall, but even for me, Detroit was shocking. There is a scene in the action movie The Crow, where gangs participate in an annual ritual of citywide arson called Devils Night. Turns out, the tradition got its start in Detroit, where there are entire neighborhoods of abandoned, dilapidated homes just waiting to be torched. The urban race riots of the 1960s caused such bad white flight that the city suffered a bizarre death spiral that has left it with half the population it had in 1950. Very few other urban centers in the country can claim such a dubious distinction.

According to my old publisher, the Detroit housing situation was so bad that in the worst neighborhoods of town many of which have a haunted, bombed-out look you typically find in war zonesthat it was not uncommon for people to buy a run-down home for a few thousand dollars in cash and then simply abandon it when it needed repairs. And this is before the city became Ground Zero in the subprime mortgage fiasco. While the rest of the country continues to struggle with bad housing numbers that leave some worried a second recession is on the horizon, its nothing compared to what Detroit faces. The average home price in the city is down to around $7,000. Last year, it was over $13,000. At this point, owning a car is a better investment than owning real estate in Detroit, but not even the Big Three automakers can get behind those numbers.

Which brings me to the real topic of this story: health care.

According to the Detroit News, there are some $1.3 billion in new hospital building projects in the works, including a $850 million upgrade to the Detroit Medical Centers hospitals and a $500 million development plan for land south of Henry Ford Healths Detroit hospital. But all of isnt necessarily a good thing, the News reports. On the one hand, all that redevelopment money would be a welcome addition to the citys foundering economy. But according to a report released by the National Institute for Health Care Reform, shiny new hospitals would likely drive up the cost of health care in terms of a greater cost burden on area employers and higher premiums.