Significant Drops in Small Businesses in 2009 (US down 24%) | Hacker News Reader

Significant Drops in Small Businesses in 2009 (US down 24%)

economist.com

16 pointscwan16 comments

I wonder if this takes into account the new micro tech startups? I doubt it.

What this is really indicative of is just how bad the credit situation was in early 2009. I know that restaurants and other capital intensive 'start-ups' really suffered.

I don't think so, as I deal with such startups every day and they are going very strong right now.

Startups can be viewed from what I call an "MBA perspective" or from an "independent founder" perspective, and these views are fundamentally different. The Economist sees the world from the MBA perspective and is not at all focused on what might be called the street level where independent launch and grow their ventures.

This is now actually a very promising time for early-stage ventures that do not have immediate capital-intensive needs.

This is bad. Over 66% of job creation comes from small business, up to 50% GPD and 33% of exports. Small business never gets the support it needs in America today. There just isn't enough money to pay for the lobbyists.

Healthcare is also a huge contributing factor to people not starting businesses today.

Reduced personal wealth, no easy access to credit, reduced consumer demand... but that isn't the whole story.

IMHO the health care problem has a huge impact on this. I'm a Canadian expat in the US right now, and I unfortunately had to pay a visit to an American ER last night. I'm insured, so my out of pocket costs are manageable, but imagine a startup founder struggling to get to ramen profitability doing the same.

Oh, unrelated note: the whole "private health care works better" thing is total hogwash. ER wait times here are as bad as they are in Canada, main difference is that in one place you're not paying through the nose for it.

Ummm, was their any change in the provision of health care in the US in 2009? If not, how is health care relevant to a change specific to 2009?

I wasn't thinking about the 2009 dip per se, but rather how large the US's entrepreneurial drop was in comparison to other countries in the same time frame. I imagine places where health care is a significant unknown, and potentially catastrophic financially, would experience a larger loss of interest in economically turbulent times.

I suppose so, but one point here (that I'm sure many delude themselves above) is that there is no safety. Working for a startup and e.g. paying for minimal catastrophic coverage is not necessarily more dangerous than working for the established companies who have laid off millions (???) of workers in the US this recession (many many if not "millions"; heck, 600K+ workers dropped out of the US job market in December 2009 alone).

And ... hmmm, if you're in a country with nationalized health care and resultant higher price levels, aren't your expenses and therefore ramen profitability just that much higher? I.e. you pay one way or another ... and if you're young, you're subsidizing the older (and in the US, the elderly in Medicare as well).

Actually, because tax time is coming up, and I'm a citizen of Canada who has to file taxes in both the US and Canada, I've been doing the math on this, the "nationalized health care is more expensive" thing is really quite the myth (that I believed myself).

Firstly, there's the commonly known factoid that the US spends more per capita for health care than any other industrialized nation - in fact you guys pay more than 2x what Canada pays for each of its citizens. So health care, on an aggregate basis anyhow, is actually much more expensive in the USA than Canada.

Secondly is the burden on the individual - I did the taxes for what I would have to pay in taxes in Canada (if I had earned the income there), and the total comes out to about $2K more than my tax burden in the USA. Considering my insurance (employer-subsidized) is still some $100 a month, the difference becomes even less pronounced. Not to mention there's no such thing as a co-pay in Canada (my US insurance plan has mediocre co-pays). Put it all together and suddenly you wonder why America just can't take the money it's already paying and just create a public system where everyone gets care.

As a Canadian, that's the bizarre thing I've found about the American system. The US spends more per capita on Medicare than Canadians do on healthcare - you'd think they would want to try to fix that before they tried to "extend coverage" and force everyone to participate in a public system. I should point out further though that the Canadian model is less than sustainable. As I've mentioned to others in the past, it took me over 6 months to book a physical and unless you know people access to specialists is a very lengthy wait.

As cwan points out, access to a waiting list is not access to health care.

When you ignore easily gamed statistics like life expectancy and look at things like cancer survival rates, you see that we seem to be getting something for the extra money we're spending. And we're a rich nation, it would hardly be odd for us to choose to spend a lot there.

And for now, there are choices. At times I've had minimal health insurance, e.g. catastrophic illness or injury was covered but not my occasional sinus infection.

Talking about gamed statistics: only those who received treatment are counted. While it's true that the US medical system has the highest rating for providing the right treatment is has the lowest rating for accessibility. Does it really matter how good the treatment is if you can't get it?

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Content/Publications/Fund-Re...

I'm impressed: a study that ranks the US #1 in "right care", meaning "effective care", but ends up giving the U.K. the #1 position in overall quality with the US and Canada as 5 and 6. Right.... (Well, I'll believe that Canada deserves a low ranking :-).

Now, that doesn't address your point about access, but I can't put too much weight in the study.

If you get to pick your patients of course it's much easier to rank first...

I don't really see the point in continuing this: you've already made up your mind about the validity of public vs. private health care. If any claims are made without numbers, you will demand numbers; when numbers are provided, you will claim they are gamed, skewed, or otherwise misinterpreted.

The relevant information is there - and from my experiences and wait time in the ER yesterday I cannot say I'm terribly impressed by the availability of your medical system. It wasn't a particularly busy night, but wait times were about equal to what I'd expect in Canada.

I've met many other expats from nationalized-healthcare countries who have lived in the US (some for well over a decade), and I've yet to meet a single one that doesn't regard America's health care system as some kind of barbarism.

I lived in the UK for 27 years, and then moved to California and have lived here for 7 years.

I agree. The American health care system is barbaric, and is just about the only reason my wife and I occasionally think about moving back to Europe.

The credit factor is a huge portion of it. We've been in business for just over two years, and it's essentially impossible to get even a business credit card currently. We've tried multiple times in the last year and been declined each time without regard for personal credit scores.

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