T
he Affordable Care Act is expected to produce a sharp increase in entrepreneurship next year, according to a new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Urban Institute and Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. The number of self-employed people is expected to rise by 1.5 million — a relative increase of more than 11 percent — as a direct result of the health care overhaul.
One major barrier to entrepreneurship in the United States — beside the usual risks involved with starting a company — is that it has been difficult to get health insurance on the individual market. Those who do end up founding or joining a start-up are often able to do so because they have a spouse with employer-sponsored insurance, or because they are keeping a day job with a bigger company. (This was the case, for example, for most of the people involved with Leap2, a Kansas City start-up that I profiled last fall.)
