From today's public radio story on the Marketplace show, at http://marketplace.publicradio.org/d...urban-detroit/

Brooks Patterson has identified health care industry as a key to increasing Oakland County employment. Objections to this include: overbuilding of hospital capacity leading in general to higher health care costs all around, and the area is already well-served medically. There was a discussion of the Certificate of Need commission, which is supposed to determined whether new hospitals are actually necessary, though in recent years it has been bypassed politically. Some interesting quotes:

"...Now keep in mind, the Certificate of Need commission is endorsed by all the state's top employers. In fact, General Motors did a study that found that the commission kept down health costs and might free up the company to hire more workers. But here's what happened when I just brought that up to Brooks.
WARNER: They showed me a study that said that Michigan had kept costs lower than other states, and they attributed that to the strong CON process because once a hosp--
PATTERSON: Is that the company that just went bankrupt? And you're taking advice from those yahoos about health care costs?! That's what bankrupted their company to begin with was the health care costs and now they're experts in how to keep costs down?!"
... but it sounds so much better than it reads!

Also from a guy representing companies/unions who pay for health insurance...

"DENNIS MCCAFFERTY: If the goal is to create jobs? There's some vacant space in downtown Detroit. Why don't we build some pyramids? We can employ tens of thousands of people for 40 or 50 years. And they would make as much sense as building redundant hospital capacity."
I don't think Brooks and Dennis get together for a beer very often.