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Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship. I had to also wait till I paid off my student loans. There are a whole lot of shackles

Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship. I had to also wait till I paid off my student loans. There are a whole lot of shackles if you come from a humble background to starting a company full time. On the other hand it has never been cheaper to start a side hustle.

war1025 6y ago
> Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship. I have a dream that Healthcare will someday be decoupled from employment. So much waste is tolerated simply due to the fact that the majority of the expense is borne by your employer before the number they put on your paycheck. I can live on a part time salary without issue, but health insurance, which is already $200/wk for my family with my employer chipping in, would jump to more like $600/wk, which is just completely untenable. There is no sane reason why health insurance should be my single largest expense each month.
- nemo136 6y ago
  That is more or less what we have in France, it comes with other issues... like really high taxes. But we have many start-ups, which usually migrate to the US as soon as they grow big.
- danilocesar 6y ago
  You know that your dream is actually the standard in every developed nation except the US right?
  - war1025 6y ago
    That's what makes it seem achievable.
- Someone1234 6y ago
  They could even do this without too many major changes. Just three in fact: - Increase HSA Contribution Limit - Allow both Traditional & High Deductible insurance premiums to be paid with the HSA - Ban employers from directly providing/choosing insurance (ex. US Military) Essentially everyone goes out onto the open market and buys their insurance using pre-tax HSA contributions (similar to tax benefits to employers now). Employers can continue to "help" be providing dollars to HSA/HSA match, rather than picking your insurance for you. There are more radical and arguably better solutions, but if you want to see a large improvement with minimal changes/the least controversy this is it. Most insurance companies could likely just convert existing employer provided policies into employee direct ones paid via HSA.
  - luigibosco 6y ago
    You're assuming people have the money to contribute to an HSA and an employer when many do not.
    - Someone1234 6y ago
      I am talking about a solution to separating employers from your choice of insurance policy, you're talking about an entirely different issue. I said there are other, arguably better, solutions (e.g. universal coverage) whereas this is an attempt to solve a near-term issue of employer provided health insurance. If you can get the political support to pass universal reform to health coverage in the US, then absolutely do that instead. In the current political climate this compromise is still a vast improvement.
  - snakeboy 6y ago
    Is there any momentum behind these ideas? I don't have any idea what the state of US healthcare reform is.
    - Someone1234 6y ago
      Nope. The current "war" is between complete re-invention and essentially the status quo. This is neither of those, therefore it upsets both sides, and gets squished by "perfect is the enemy of good."
    - aksss 6y ago
      Yes, at least two big changes were attempted in last administration with 50% success rate. First, loosening restrictions on association health plans which would have allowed diverse groups of small businesses in an area to band together to negotiate lower rates as if a larger organization. This was struck down by the federal court. The second, and successful, move was to allow health reimbursement accounts (HRA) to pay for insurance premiums on the individual market. These plans, an ICHRA, would allow a small business to essentially give pre-tax dollars to the employee for buying health insurance as long as the reimbursements were applied consistently across the employee base. The second was great, but the first would have been even better since it would have lowered group rates. Individual insurance premiums and deductibles (when not subsidized by gov) are often so expensive they are hard to justify. Still ICHRA’s are at least another tool for employers and employees to share the burden.
umvi 6y ago
> Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship Would it though? From what I understand EU has way better social safety nets, yet much smaller entrepreneurship rates compared to USA. Counter-intuitively, limitations drive innovations. When your resources are limited, you are forced to innovate. When you have infinite resources, you tend to waste it. Ever notice that when you have infinite time, you waste it doing nothing, but when your time is extremely constrained, you tend to use it much more effectively? Same thing happens with companies and money. Read: NASA, Texas Instruments developing laser guided bombs, etc. For example, because TI had such a limited budget for developing laser guided bombs, they couldn't afford a wind tunnel like their defense-contractor competition. So they dropped scale models of bombs into swimming pools and performed mathematical transformations on the measurements. TI's design ended up being far more innovative and outperformed their money-flush competitors[0] All that said, I think there is some truth to what you say. If healthcare were decoupled from employers, I would be much more likely to leave my current company and start my own since that is one thing holding me back. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paveway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paveway
- medium_burrito 6y ago
  China Lake's development of the Sidewinder missile is a similar story - minimal resources, compared to the vast amounts wasted on radar guided missiles that more or less didn't work until much later. However, I think it's orthogonal. Limitations are good, but having a basic fallback is also good.
- ska 6y ago
  > Would it though? From what I understand EU has way better social safety nets, yet much smaller entrepreneurship rates compared to USA. This is definitely a multiple factor problem, and health care is just one of them. A couple obvious ones - social acceptance/rejection of this as a path, and government/financial friction. If you have only been exposed to the US, it's pretty shocking how hard it is to get a company up and running in many countries. One of the biggies is fairly direct access to capital with the right risk appetite, which itself is complex.
  - 6y ago
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Healthcare is decoupled from employment in a number of countries, but barriers to entrepreneurship remain high, sometimes even higher than in the United States.
BluePen8 6y ago
With the caveat that as long as it doesn't require physical space. With the cost of space in any major city, anything that requires a workshop, working space, or significant storage space is out of the window nowadays for anyone in a major city. When I was a teenager my side hustle was buying, fixing, and selling used cars. My dad's was the same with small fishing boats. The story of these billion dollar companies being started in their parent's garage sounds inspirational and all, but I'd imagine less so for the kids whose parents can't afford home with a garage.
- Valgrim 6y ago
  Exactly, starting out in a garage sounds like starting out from nothing, but in reality it means that your parents have a house with a garage that they lend out to you for free, where you can do whatever you want (so forget condos undergound garages), and that house is probably not very far from a large city so you have access to clients, employees and resources. You don't need your parents to be millionaires to get that, but in today's terms this is definitely upper middle class.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    Yes, many of the success stories of the 90s started out like you mentioned, the second paragraph was often, "then I borrowed 20k from Uncle Bob to buy a used Sparc station.."

war1025 6y ago

> Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship. I have a dream that Healthcare will someday be decoupled from employment. So much waste is tolerated simply due to the fact that the majority of the expense is borne by your employer before the number they put on your paycheck. I can live on a part time salary without issue, but health insurance, which is already $200/wk for my family with my employer chipping in, would jump to more like $600/wk, which is just completely untenable. There is no sane reason why health insurance should be my single largest expense each month.

nemo136 6y ago
That is more or less what we have in France, it comes with other issues... like really high taxes. But we have many start-ups, which usually migrate to the US as soon as they grow big.
danilocesar 6y ago
You know that your dream is actually the standard in every developed nation except the US right?
- war1025 6y ago
  That's what makes it seem achievable.
Someone1234 6y ago
They could even do this without too many major changes. Just three in fact: - Increase HSA Contribution Limit - Allow both Traditional & High Deductible insurance premiums to be paid with the HSA - Ban employers from directly providing/choosing insurance (ex. US Military) Essentially everyone goes out onto the open market and buys their insurance using pre-tax HSA contributions (similar to tax benefits to employers now). Employers can continue to "help" be providing dollars to HSA/HSA match, rather than picking your insurance for you. There are more radical and arguably better solutions, but if you want to see a large improvement with minimal changes/the least controversy this is it. Most insurance companies could likely just convert existing employer provided policies into employee direct ones paid via HSA.
- luigibosco 6y ago
  You're assuming people have the money to contribute to an HSA and an employer when many do not.
  - Someone1234 6y ago
    I am talking about a solution to separating employers from your choice of insurance policy, you're talking about an entirely different issue. I said there are other, arguably better, solutions (e.g. universal coverage) whereas this is an attempt to solve a near-term issue of employer provided health insurance. If you can get the political support to pass universal reform to health coverage in the US, then absolutely do that instead. In the current political climate this compromise is still a vast improvement.
- snakeboy 6y ago
  Is there any momentum behind these ideas? I don't have any idea what the state of US healthcare reform is.
  - Someone1234 6y ago
    Nope. The current "war" is between complete re-invention and essentially the status quo. This is neither of those, therefore it upsets both sides, and gets squished by "perfect is the enemy of good."
  - aksss 6y ago
    Yes, at least two big changes were attempted in last administration with 50% success rate. First, loosening restrictions on association health plans which would have allowed diverse groups of small businesses in an area to band together to negotiate lower rates as if a larger organization. This was struck down by the federal court. The second, and successful, move was to allow health reimbursement accounts (HRA) to pay for insurance premiums on the individual market. These plans, an ICHRA, would allow a small business to essentially give pre-tax dollars to the employee for buying health insurance as long as the reimbursements were applied consistently across the employee base. The second was great, but the first would have been even better since it would have lowered group rates. Individual insurance premiums and deductibles (when not subsidized by gov) are often so expensive they are hard to justify. Still ICHRA’s are at least another tool for employers and employees to share the burden.

umvi 6y ago

> Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship Would it though? From what I understand EU has way better social safety nets, yet much smaller entrepreneurship rates compared to USA. Counter-intuitively, limitations drive innovations. When your resources are limited, you are forced to innovate. When you have infinite resources, you tend to waste it. Ever notice that when you have infinite time, you waste it doing nothing, but when your time is extremely constrained, you tend to use it much more effectively? Same thing happens with companies and money. Read: NASA, Texas Instruments developing laser guided bombs, etc. For example, because TI had such a limited budget for developing laser guided bombs, they couldn't afford a wind tunnel like their defense-contractor competition. So they dropped scale models of bombs into swimming pools and performed mathematical transformations on the measurements. TI's design ended up being far more innovative and outperformed their money-flush competitors[0] All that said, I think there is some truth to what you say. If healthcare were decoupled from employers, I would be much more likely to leave my current company and start my own since that is one thing holding me back. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paveway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paveway

medium_burrito 6y ago
China Lake's development of the Sidewinder missile is a similar story - minimal resources, compared to the vast amounts wasted on radar guided missiles that more or less didn't work until much later. However, I think it's orthogonal. Limitations are good, but having a basic fallback is also good.
ska 6y ago
> Would it though? From what I understand EU has way better social safety nets, yet much smaller entrepreneurship rates compared to USA. This is definitely a multiple factor problem, and health care is just one of them. A couple obvious ones - social acceptance/rejection of this as a path, and government/financial friction. If you have only been exposed to the US, it's pretty shocking how hard it is to get a company up and running in many countries. One of the biggies is fairly direct access to capital with the right risk appetite, which itself is complex.
- 6y ago

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

Healthcare is decoupled from employment in a number of countries, but barriers to entrepreneurship remain high, sometimes even higher than in the United States.

BluePen8 6y ago

With the caveat that as long as it doesn't require physical space. With the cost of space in any major city, anything that requires a workshop, working space, or significant storage space is out of the window nowadays for anyone in a major city. When I was a teenager my side hustle was buying, fixing, and selling used cars. My dad's was the same with small fishing boats. The story of these billion dollar companies being started in their parent's garage sounds inspirational and all, but I'd imagine less so for the kids whose parents can't afford home with a garage.

Valgrim 6y ago
Exactly, starting out in a garage sounds like starting out from nothing, but in reality it means that your parents have a house with a garage that they lend out to you for free, where you can do whatever you want (so forget condos undergound garages), and that house is probably not very far from a large city so you have access to clients, employees and resources. You don't need your parents to be millionaires to get that, but in today's terms this is definitely upper middle class.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Yes, many of the success stories of the 90s started out like you mentioned, the second paragraph was often, "then I borrowed 20k from Uncle Bob to buy a used Sparc station.."