The drag on entrepreneurialism would significantly heavier if companies and individuals weren't allowed to freeload.
Measuring that difference is actually the methodology the linked study used; their main source of data was looking at the difference between people who had coverage via a spouse and those who didn't, then attempting to control for confounding variables. In effect people with coverage through a spouse serve as a "freeloaders" control group who are assumed not to suffer the health-insurance drag on entrepreneurship (or at least not to fully suffer it).
There is a big difference between financial compensation and offering health insurance for entrepreneurs. Startups frequently pay low salaries (ones that may not support the high cost of health insurance) in return for an equity stake that offers the possibility of a high future payout. You cannot similarly defer health care benefits: when cash is tight, you either offer costly benefits at the expense of other priorities or leave your employees without health insurance. This tradeoff is not present if the insurance system isn't employer-based.
Of course this is only part of the explanation for how our system impedes entrepreneurship. One way or another, we're all paying an absurd amount just to keep us (somewhat) healthy.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/02...
When you raise the minimum wage, or require the employer to provide health insurance, you are closing the door on many potential employees and definitely increasing the unemployment rate.
Employees are paid according to their value. If you are making low wages it's either what you're worth, or because you're too stupid to realize you're being exploited.
I for one think people have a right to be either worthless or stupid, and therefore do not think business should be regulated in such a way.
Reality, you already have socialised care. It's just really inefficient. And you pay extra for private cover!
I don't know that to be true, here in Florida we have a lot of immigration, many of them are fleeing worse places and don't have a lot of money and definitely don't have insurance, so they go to the ER like others go to their general practitioner. They do this because hospitals are not allowed to refuse treatment to the uninsured.
If you break your arm or get poked in the eye and don't have insurance, you do not get refused treatment at the ER.
A much bigger issue is higher insurance premiums due to unhealthy lifestyles.
Preventable poor health due to obesity, poor nutrition and lack of exercise are a major contributor to health care costs.
That results in higher costs for everybody.
As a healthy, fit, non-smoker and non-drug user, why should I have to pay their costs?
Somebody ought to tell that to Goldman Sachs or just about any big american corporation which pays insane amounts to people who have a track record of running businesses into the ground.
>No one forced the employees of his company to apply.
Companies have been proven to be conspiring to keep wages down just recently. An employee is forced to work somewhere.
But I bet you think the insane amount of money CEOs get is their "market rate" too.
Yet the point of this study seems to be that employer-centric health-arrangements prevent new business formation.
Let's assume new business formation is something we want to maximize. (New businesses are how our culture rapidly searches for new productive arrangements, and countries with lower rates of business-formation tend to stagnate on lots of other things too.)
Then we have to get away from the cultural expectation that the employer is the direct payer/purchaser of health costs.
Whether the responsibility moves to the national government ('single-payer'), or other governmental bodies, or individuals/families, or other civic/voluntary/religious associations is a separate issue. It has to get away from companies, or else we're losing out on business-formation (and job-mobility) that we need.
My point was that the only reason the current system hasn't completely killed new business formation is that employees and founders are able to freeload. Freeloading takes a broken system and makes it even more unfair and dysfunctional.
Still, what you call 'freeloading' I see as local approximations of a more-logical system, where someone else – anyone else – pays rather than companies directly. Since it allows a necessary good thing – business formation – to happen, it looks like a step in a fairer/more-functional direction to me.