Get a job

I have made this point before - that one of the most important reasons for health care reform is the negative impact the current system has on job mobility and entrepreneurship. It is probably the most significant argument that I have made.

As a fundamental matter, American workers should not be tied into jobs just because of employer-provided health insurance. It's bad policy, and bad economics. It creates inefficiencies and unhappy employees, strains the budgets of small business, makes American products more expensive and less competitive with foreign products, creates incentives to move industries overseas, and creates more perverse incentives for retail businesses to avoid providing permanent positions, stacking their payroll with part-time employees to whom they don't provide health care insurance. Among the results - lower quality work from unhappy, uncommitted employees who stuggle to get in enough hours to make ends meet, who still face the risk of economic catastrophe from an ill-timed injury or sickness.

And then:

The current health care system, which is rooted in employer-subsidized private health insurance, is a failure for those who don't have access to it, and an albatross around the necks of innumerable Americans who are trapped in unhappy working conditions, a hinderance to entrepreneurship, and an anticompetitive burden on American business. The status quo discourages risk-taking ventures that form the backbone of capitalism; it encourages low wage, part-time employment instead of full-time employment with full benefits. It makes workers less productive and less committed to their employers. It makes our products more expensive and less competitive against foreign products and encourages the (almost complete) shift of our nation's manufacturing base offshore. The current system makes us less stable and less competitive as a nation, and less moral as a people.

Over the last couple of days, Sullivan and Ezra Klein have been tackling the issue, too. Ezra points to a study by MIT economist Jon Gruber, which concludes:

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. Indeed, even the Galtians among us should be celebrating the expanded potential for individual enterprise once the chains tying them to a job that provides insurance have been broken.

The GOP claims to be the party of small business. With its resistance to any genuine health care reform, among other things, nothing could be farther from the truth.