Is Employer-Based Health Insurance A Barrier To Entrepreneurship? (2010)
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Re: Is Employer-Based Health Insurance A Barrier To Entrepreneurship? (2010)
#2+1 this research being done. When I bootstrapped Parse.ly by doing consulting in 2009/2010, my biggest costs were rent and healthcare. I wrote about this in my blog post, "Startups: not for the faint of heart". http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2011/04/02/not-for-the-faint-of-h...
To get a good "sole proprietorship" plan for me cost >$1,100 a month. My healthcare cost nearly as much as my rent in Astoria, NYC.
I've spoken to many budding entrepreneurs in NYC, and they have told tell that the loss of an employer-provided healthcare plan is a major factor that stops people from quitting their jobs to start a company.
Re: Is Employer-Based Health Insurance A Barrier To Entrepreneurship? (2010)
#3Yes, and duh. Corp provided health insurance means the employer controls the labor liquidity, not the employees. The hypocrite Republicans should have loved to offload the cost of health insurance onto the taxpayer, not the corp. But the power of employee control even trumps direct bottom line profits.
Wal-Mart gets it, that is why it encourages employees to seek public assistance and pays them so little that they still qualify.
Re: Is Employer-Based Health Insurance A Barrier To Entrepreneurship? (2010)
#4Yes. It's a hindrance to most life paths that don't involve full-time employment. As someone with a chronic auto-immune condition I'm effectively tethered to an employer or a spouse if I want health coverage.
Should I choose pursue an art as my vocation or start a company I'd have to be willing to endure a lag in my insurance until whatever I was pursuing became successful enough that I was eligible to be covered by a trade group or had enough revenue to buy health insurance.
Guaranteed, affordable health coverage not tied to an employer or a spouse would remove a incredible burden from my life.
Re: Is Employer-Based Health Insurance A Barrier To Entrepreneurship? (2010)
#5Yes. It's a hindrance to most life paths that don't involve full-time employment. As someone with a chronic auto-immune condition I'm effectively tethered to an employer or a spouse if I want health coverage. Should I choose pursue an art as my vocation or start a company I'd have to be willing to endure a lag in my insurance until whatever I was pursuing became successful enough that I was eligible to be covered by…
Once the PPACA exchanges phase in next year, will that ameliorate the problems in your case? They seem like they target this case specifically, essentially trying to turn each state's population into a large risk pool that anyone can buy into, rather than having risk pools be employer-tied.
Re: Is Employer-Based Health Insurance A Barrier To Entrepreneurship? (2010)
#6+1 this research being done. When I bootstrapped Parse.ly by doing consulting in 2009/2010, my biggest costs were rent and healthcare. I wrote about this in my blog post, "Startups: not for the faint of heart". http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2011/04/02/not-for-the-faint-of-h... To get a good "sole proprietorship" plan for me cost >$1,100 a month. My healthcare cost nearly as much as my rent in Astoria, NYC. I've spoken t…
was this just for yourself, or a family? $1100 seems steep - a 'high deductible' HSA plan for a single person should be < $500/month - it's currently < $350 for two of us.
Re: Is Employer-Based Health Insurance A Barrier To Entrepreneurship? (2010)
#7This had a huge mindshare for me when deciding who to approach as a co-founder. While I'm younger and incredibly healthy, my ideal co-founder is 9 years older than me and spent much of his 20s as a semi-professional athlete. It's catching up to him now. After I approached him, I brought up healthcare and that I knew it would be important to him and that we'd figure that out together somehow. We were both disappointed at how little healthcare reform shelters entrepreneurs. In the end, languishing at someone else's company, but insured, is not the way he wanted to spend his life. If he had a family, that might have been a harder decision to make.
Re: Is Employer-Based Health Insurance A Barrier To Entrepreneurship? (2010)
#8Yes. It's a hindrance to most life paths that don't involve full-time employment. As someone with a chronic auto-immune condition I'm effectively tethered to an employer or a spouse if I want health coverage. Should I choose pursue an art as my vocation or start a company I'd have to be willing to endure a lag in my insurance until whatever I was pursuing became successful enough that I was eligible to be covered by…
Once the PPACA exchanges phase in next year, will that ameliorate the problems in your case? They seem like they target this case specifically, essentially trying to turn each state's population into a large risk pool that anyone can buy into, rather than having risk pools be employer-tied.
You beat me to it! (For those who don't know, the PPACA is sometimes called "Obamacare" although it should be noted that the name is more a result of political maneuvering than the result of particularly close affiliation with Obama.)
I still think we should go all the way to single-payer. Other countries have had such success with this model that it's becoming very difficult to argue that it's inherently flawed (rather than the other way around). If the US health industry had to compete directly with any of these systems, it would go out of business tomorrow, since they offer similar care (in terms of outcome rates) at half the price per person. That doesn't even include the effects on entrepreneurship and employment!
While the ACA did little to fix the "US health care costs twice as much and doesn't deliver better outcomes" problem, it does have a good shot at fixing the preexisting condition and individual insurance debacles.
Re: Is Employer-Based Health Insurance A Barrier To Entrepreneurship? (2010)
#9The larger the employer, the better the deal they can work out with the insurance provider for their employees. This is definitely one of the reasons why jobs with IBM or UBS, say, are more desirable to most folks than the assured struggle called entrepreneurship.
Re: Is Employer-Based Health Insurance A Barrier To Entrepreneurship? (2010)
#10[deleted]