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If Health Care Reform Fails, America’s Innovation Gap Will Grow
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| Parent(s) |
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| Contributor | Servo |
| Last Edited | Servo Dec 16, 2009 11:09am |
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| Category | News |
| Author | David Leonhardt |
| Media | Newspaper - New York Times |
| News Date | Tuesday, December 15, 2009 05:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Greg Woock is the chief executive of Pinger, a fast-growing Silicon Valley company that makes iPhone applications. So Mr. Woock spends a fair amount of time interviewing job applicants. In almost every interview, he told me recently, the applicant asks about Pinger’s health insurance plan.
Now think about that for a minute.
In the cradle of American innovation, workers are making career choices based on co-payments, pre-existing conditions and other minutiae of health insurance. They are not necessarily making decisions based on what would be best for their careers and, in turn, for the American economy — that is, “where their skills match and where they can grow the most,” as another Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Cyriac Roeding, says. Health insurance, Mr. Roeding adds, “is distorting the decision-making.”
It is impossible to know how much economic damage these distortions are causing, but they clearly aren’t good. Economic research suggests that more than 1.5 million workers who would otherwise have switched jobs fail to do so every year because of fears about health insurance. Some of them would have moved to companies where they could have contributed more, and others would have started their own businesses. |
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