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A good chunk of Detroit’s debt problem is a health-costs problem. The Detroit Free Press notes that the city has $5.7 billion in unfunded retiree health-care liabilities, nearly a third of the city’s debt.

. It plans to transition its 19,389 retirees into the health law’s new marketplaces, saving the city somewhere between $27.5 million and $40 million annually.

. One report from the Pew Center for the States looked at 61 cities across the country and found that, taken together, they had $126.2 billion in health benefits promised to retirees. Only 6 percent of that amount – $8 billion – currently has funding.

he actions of these other employers don’t detract from the unique nature of Walgreens’ decision. Two months earlier, the retailer announced its partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services to extol the benefits of Obamacare to its employees and its customers. Their website still features the effort, and brochures continue to be distributed even while the corporation itself realizes that compliance must force it to abandon employer-provided health insurance for the people in the stores distributing the brochures to customers.

With the CBO predicting that rising health-care costs would increase at twice the rate of other federal spending, the same increase in costs will now be borne almost entirely by employees.  Finally, it appears that the private-exchange option will satisfy the employer mandate, which means that the employees cannot bail out of these private exchanges in order to qualify for federal subsidies, which prevents the employers from having to pay increasing fines for non-compliance.

limit the liability of the third-party payer.

"Fine. A big group, we can understand the overall risk. We can model that. We're happy. But individuals, we're not so sure, and that's why the individual insurance market, which is a market where Americans who don't get insurance from their employer or the government have to turn, that's why that market is so screwed up all around the country and why we needed the Affordable Care Act.

First, it was not primarily intended to push people to obtain protection for their own good, but to protect others. Like auto damage liability insurance required in most states, our requirement focused on "catastrophic" costs -- so hospitals and taxpayers would not have to foot the bill for the expensive illness or accident of someone who did not buy insurance.