Obamacare’s Other Surprise - Spawning of Startups

[flamingdem]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/friedman-obamacares-other-surprise.html?smid=fb-share

LISTENING to the debate about President Obama’s health care plan, some critics argue that Obamacare is going to need Obamacare — because it’s going to be a “train wreck.” Obama officials insist they’re wrong. We’ll just have to wait and see whether the Affordable Care Act, as the health care law is officially known, surprises us on the downside. But there is one area where the law already appears to be surprising on the upside. And that is the number of health care information start-ups it’s spurring. This is a big deal.

The combination of Obamacare regulations, incentives in the recovery act for doctors and hospitals to shift to electronic records and the releasing of mountains of data held by the Department of Health and Human Services is creating a new marketplace and platform for innovation — a health care Silicon Valley — that has the potential to create better outcomes at lower costs by changing how health data are stored, shared and mined. It’s a new industry.

Obamacare is based on the notion that a main reason we pay so much more than any other industrial nation for health care, without better results, is because the incentive structure in our system is wrong. Doctors and hospitals are paid primarily for procedures and tests, not health outcomes. The goal of the health care law is to flip this fee-for-services system (which some insurance companies are emulating) to one where the government pays doctors and hospitals to keep Medicare patients healthy and the services they do render are reimbursed more for their value than volume.

[ProSense]

1. Affordable Care Act Could Be Good for Entrepreneurship

Affordable Care Act Could Be Good for Entrepreneurship

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

The Affordable Care Act is expected to produce a sharp increase in entrepreneurship next year, according to a new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Urban Institute and Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. The number of self-employed people is expected to rise by 1.5 million — a relative increase of more than 11 percent — as a direct result of the health care overhaul.

One major barrier to entrepreneurship in the United States — beside the usual risks involved with starting a company — is that it has been difficult to get health insurance on the individual market. Those who do end up founding or joining a start-up are often able to do so because they have a spouse with employer-sponsored insurance, or because they are keeping a day job with a bigger company. (This was the case, for example, for most of the people involved with Leap2, a Kansas City start-up that I profiled last fall.)

Economists have looked at whether this insurance-related job lock is deterring self-employment and the formation of new businesses, and the data suggest it is. A Journal of Health Economics paper, for example, found that business ownership rates jumped sharply from just under age 65 to just over age 65, when people become newly eligible for Medicare. Using Current Population Survey data, the same paper also found that wage and salary workers are more likely to start businesses from one year to the next if they have a spouse with employer-based insurance.

<...>

The report released Friday applies those findings to a model of what will happen in 2014, based on the Affordable Care Act’s provisions for “universal availability of non-group coverage, the financial assistance available for it, and other related market reforms.” The authors also adjusted their numbers depending on the access that residents of various states already have to individual health insurance. (Vermont, for example, already has a statute that allows the self-employed to obtain small group coverage.) Over all, they found, the ranks of the self-employed are likely to rise 11.5 percent, from about 13.1 million to 14.6 million. A table with their state-by-state estimates is below.

- more -

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/affordable-care-act-could-be-good-for-entrepreneurship

[cbdo2007]

2. I wish I was one of the people smart enough to know how to do this....

I've got a lot of respect for people who know how to start a company and run it, because I know it's something I would never know how to do.