Earlier today I mentioned in a comment that single payer healthcare is pro-entrepreneur. I know people who won't leave a corporate job because to be self-employed or start their own company is to risk massive health insurance bills, or perhaps the loss of health insurance due to a business failure.
Our politicians puff out their chests reflexively when talking about small business being the "economic engine".
But the facts, measured in a 2009 study (WARNING: PDF) by John Schmitt and Nathan Lane at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, sadly contradict some of the fantasies.
By every measure of small-business employment, the United States has among the world’s smallest small-business sectors (as a proportion of total national employment)...And why might that be?
One plausible explanation for the consistently higher shares of self-employment and small-business employment in the rest of the world’s rich economies is that all have some form of universal access to health care. The high cost to self-employed workers and small businesses of the private, employer-based health care system in place in the United States may act as a significant deterrent to small start-up companies, an experience not shared by entrepreneurs in countries with universal access to health care.