It doesn't make sense to make healthcare the responsibility of the entrepreneur

Without health reform, entrepreneurs will continue to take the wrong risks. Starting a company is the art of making do without resources. This often means limiting your own compensation and forgoing health insurance at the start. When recruiting employees, its difficult in the early stages of a company to offer health benefits that comparable let alone competitive with those of larger companies.

[From Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been looking at how startups operate in other countries with more “socialized” medicine such as Spain, and while they are broadly disadvantaged on many aspects compared to US companies, when it comes to healthcare, the US is one of the toughest environments.

For me, at the core of the issue is that the burden for healthcare is put on the entrepreneur. We can argue all we want about whether this should be an individual responsibility of the citizen or a collective responsibility of society expressed through a government program, but whatever the alternative, most people agree it should not be the responsibility of the employer.