Maybe more management's bad decisions than unions, Mr. Turtle...
I recall, in the 1950s, when every year VW beatle sales were increasing dramatically and the major U.S. Car company's were telling us what we want. "We Americans don't want little cars! We want BIG cars" with gold flecked, clear plastic seat covers. Kinda like when IBM said those little microcomputers are just toys, they're never going to replace mainframes. When IBM was finally forced to make a foray into the PC market (the "PC" abbreviation is due to IBM!) --- they had success at first, but eventually failed because of intense competition. Speaking of failure, does anyone remember the IBM "Peanut". They failed to appreciate the importance of what was happening all around them. They waited far to long to jump in. When they finally did, they thought they could trade on their reputation. They drastically underestimated their competition. IBM put out a flashy whole page ad in trade publications saying they were going to bring legitimacy to the mini and micro computer market. Data General, or one of the other big mini computer manufacturers at the time, responded with their own ad saying "The Bastards say Welcome." (I wish to god I'd had framed those two ads.) Needless to say, IBM was never able to dominate the PC market as thy thought they easily would. They sold to Lenovo after a long quiescent period. Had they jumped in early, when Altair's headquarters was located in a backyard garage in Albuquerque, they might have captured what became the microcomputer revolution. (In the early days, you bought microprocessor kits from an ad in the back of Popular Mechanics.)*
Naturally, there are many reasons GM couldn't survive the Great Recession and eventually was reorganized out of Chapter eleven. Probably those reasons had less to do with Unions and more to do with bad decisions on the part of management. But we should not overlook the two billion it cost GM to buy itself out of the PUT Option they gave Fiat (see History of GM on Wiki) and the role medical care costs of retirees played in bringing down GM, once the worlds largest corporation.
As to U.S. Medical care costs, they're only at the disaster stage. It's got to get to the the point where everyone in the economy is working on medical billing before we are forced to fix the problem --- 155 million working age adults all sitting behind computers typing on insurance forms. We are still a ways off from that --- not all that far though. We will get there. Eventually will be out of stop gap measures. We'll be forced to adopt the same solution that all other developed countries have. It is just a matter of time. We insist on finding our own solutions to every problem and pay no attention to what has already proven to work. You've heard of "American Exceptionalism". Well, ingrained stupidity is where it comes from.
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*when you have time, go to
https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1973/ This bring back so many memories to me. I was a part of this. I had junk like this in my lab and we wrote our own operating system in Forth (which see).
