Merkel, Sarkozy, Chirac, all those guys

[y66]

Where is Canada's "Silicon Valley" and how's it doing relative to California's Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128 Corridor? If David Leonhardt is right, it should be growing somewhat faster than it's southerly competitors.

 

December 16, 2009

ECONOMIC SCENE

If Health Care Reform Fails, America’s Innovation Gap Will Grow

 

By DAVID LEONHARDT

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.

 

This link between insurance and innovation isn’t relevant merely for the obvious reason that Congress is in the late stages of debating health reform. It is also relevant because the United States is suffering from an innovation deficit.

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