Gotham’s public-health crisis risks becoming a financial crisis — including by ravaging the underfunded retirement systems promised to public workers. Four essential steps could avert catastrophe.

Even before the crisis, the city had set aside just 2 percent of the savings needed to cover retiree health benefits for city workers, while its pension funds contained only 79 cents for every dollar needed to cover projected benefits.

These fringe benefits consumed one-third of the city’s municipal payroll and one-tenth of the city’s budget. Now the city’s future revenues are suddenly even less secure.

New York City faces a $9 billion, two-year budget shortfall that is compounded by Albany’s own $14.5 billion deficit. Between 15 and 20 percent of Manhattanites were still absent from the city as of this summer, rising to 50 percent in the wealthiest neighborhoods whose tax revenue helps sustain the city’s coffers.

Market losses on the scale of the Great Recession today would mean New York City paying an additional $41.2 billion to make the public pension system whole, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office. And already, the city spent half of its savings for Other Post-Employment Benefits expenses to cover this year’s budget deficits, only worsening its projected $100 billion OPEB ­liability.

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