Over at the Washington Monthly, Jonathan Gruber writes that universal healthcare would create more fluid job markets and spur entrepreneurship:
The main reason for this is a phenomenon known as “job lock,” a term coined during the last round of debate over universal health coverage in the early 1990s. Job lock refers to the fact that workers are often unwilling to leave a current job that provides health insurance for another position that might not, even if they would be more productive in that other position. This is because employer-provided insurance is traditionally the only reliable form of fairly priced private insurance coverage available in the U.S.
….[Alison] Wellington estimates that universal health care
would therefore likely increase the share of workers who are self-employed (currently about 10 percent of the workforce) by another 2 percent or more. A system that provides universal access to health insurance coverage, then, is far more likely to promote entrepreneurship than one in which would-be innovators remain tied to corporate cubicles for fear of losing their family’s access to affordable health care.
That’s true. Take me. Suppose I wanted to quit my job and write a book. The first step would be for me to have a book in mind that I wanted to write — which, unfortunately, I don’t. But say I did. Would I leave MoJo to do it?
Probably not. I’ve never shopped around for an individual healthcare policy, but my guess is that despite my general good health, I’d get turned down simply for being over 50 and having high cholesterol. And without health insurance, I really couldn’t afford the risk of being self-employed.
It’s true that this is a moot point until I have a burning desire to spend full time writing a book, but you never know. Maybe someday I will. It doesn’t matter, though, because that book will probably stay unwritten no matter how good it might be, since I’d have to give up my health coverage to write it. Pretty stupid system we have, isn’t it?
