> In fact, Obamacare (which significantly mitigates the healthcare related costs of changing jobs)
The ACA doesn't all that significantly affect the healthcare-related impact of switching jobs (it slightly mitigates the healthcare related cost of being a difficult-to-insure individual and moving from a job that provides a group plan to one that doesn't), and the parts of it that did have some impact on that were have not been in place long enough to have substantially affected people's expectations and behavior.
The parent poster said this: ...start companies [without loss of health care], and losing healthcare as you change jobs...
Obamacare does in fact solve both these problems.
According to you, how long will it take for potential startup founders to figure out that Obamacare actually gives them the ability to do a startup without losing health insurance? 10 years? 20 years? Is a person who is unaware of Obamacare after many years (and unable to adapt to changing conditions with years of warning) really a plausible startup founder?
We have single payer here in France and we are way less entrepreneurial than the US. In fact most entrepreneurs here hate single payer as it imposes huge taxation on them for something that would be cheap under a private insurance system because most startup founders are young.
I'm not that familiar with France's system that much, but if national insurance is mandatory, wouldn't private insurance be essentially subsidised by it? Which is why you think it's so cheap in comparison. Can you even opt for private only insurance in France? It would be the only way to compare costs.
Don't take it wrong, I agree France is less entrepreneurial, I just don't think healthcare is the reason.
This is coming up as part of the reopening of the healthcare plan debate in the US. The nice framing of flat healthcare insurance pricing is that it "doesn't discriminate against the elderly." But an equally valid framing is that "younger people subsidize older people."
But this question is really at the heart of insurance mandates however imposed. In the absence of such, young healthy people don't want to pay for insurance because they don't really take into account unlikely events and they look at the health care they're likely to need for routine accidents, etc. and the insurance looks far more costly than their expected benefit (and it is).
The ACA doesn't all that significantly affect the healthcare-related impact of switching jobs (it slightly mitigates the healthcare related cost of being a difficult-to-insure individual and moving from a job that provides a group plan to one that doesn't), and the parts of it that did have some impact on that were have not been in place long enough to have substantially affected people's expectations and behavior.