Dang, you can easily draw a connection between unstable work environments and unstable technical products. It's directly in the workers benefit to keep a product reliant on them or else they could just die. That's crazy.
When you're reliant on healthcare and live in America that is first concern before anything else. Not to turn a post political, but the employer-tied healthcare situation in America is borderline a form of slavery. In tech it is simply well-paid slavery. I rarely if ever take vacations, and due to healthcare requirements cannot explore starting my own company or being without an employer to take an extended sabbatical from work. I am well compensated for my role and generally do well but if I lose my health insurance my life can be measured in months. It's a stressor that is hard to describe.
Yeah, and it ultimately harms everything. It's so interesting that ultimately this system would produce lower quality products and suppress innovation. I wonder if countries with more flexibility in health-care will have more start-ups?
Almost all other developed countries have more flexibility with healthcare! Certainly it's never been part of any of my career decisions (in Australia).
I don't believe it has much bearing on the number of start-ups, even successful ones - the US has too many other factors that overwhelmingly give it the advantage there - but I'm pretty sure it has been shown to affect upward mobility in general (America rates quite low on that compared to other countries with better safety nets and public/single payer healthcare systems, though other factors like cost of education almost certainly come into play).
