[adammarkey]

I honestly think healthcare / health insurance is a major reason.

It's hard to be "ramen AND medical bills profitable" if you or one of your founders has an urgent medical issue when you're trying to bootstrap yourselves with no insurance.

The Obama administration should look at this issue and provide significantly reduced healthcare to bootstrapped startups.

[9oliYQjP]

I for one know I couldn't have done it if it weren't for socialized (yes I'll use that evil term) medicine here in Canada. Fortunately, I haven't been sick. But I have gone to the doctor a few times over the past few years for routine checkups/physicals. Actually, I did go once when I had a terrible bronchial infection that I just couldn't seem to kick even after a few weeks. My doctor gave me a bunch of free asthma inhalers when she heard I was self-employed. The next year I got a free flu shot and didn't get sick. This was important because had I gotten the flu it would have ended up in a huge amount of lost productivity on the project I was working on and possibly resulted in public failure for the stakeholders involved (we were constantly catching up the whole way). Although to be fair, not getting the flu may have been coincidence as the flu shot prevented a strain that was not prevalent this year. Flu vaccine manufacturers always have to guess which strain they think will be dominant and target it.

The routine physicals have led to me getting back into shape. My doctor also did some blood work and discussed some changes I needed to make in my diet to reduce the risk of developing some conditions that afflict other family members. This is a major benefit of having a family doctor that everyone goes to. When your other family members aren't insured and consequently don't see a doctor, your doctor doesn't have as complete perspective of potential risks to your health. Incidentally, I'm now earning more and contributing more to taxes, so I feel like the money spent on covering my healthcare was a worthwhile investment. And no, I didn't have to wait 6 months for a physical, I waited precisely 9 days for the next schedule window that was convenient for me. The flu shot was a walk-in procedure when I had an empty patch in my schedule.

Healthcare shouldn't only be about tending to urgent matters. Not getting your yearly physical is potentially like having a memory leak. You won't know something is wrong until it's potentially too late and when you do find out, it will be a major dilemma. All too often, even when healthcare costs are covered, people just don't bother going. If you're a startup founder, don't neglect your health, and make sure you take care of your body as well as you would your car.

[mahmud]

OT:

9oliYQjP: you're one very interesting person but with a bad user name. Do you mind putting a note in your profile with a more pronouncable name? Everytime I read a comment of yours I am distracted by the machine generated name, which I somehow pronounce in my head as "Nine Olly Qiyuu Jay Pee".

[9oliYQjP]

Heh, it is a machine generated name. I am by no means well-known or a public figure, but some of the people I deal with regularly are. I have had the unfortunate experience of having people digging up dirt on some of these people try to use comments I posted to the Internet against them (e.g., an extreme example of a similar situation is how difficult it was for Obama to shake the notion that Reverend Wright's opinion was also his own). Around the same time I had to undergo a security clearance. It got me thinking about the breadcrumb trail I'd been leaving online. If I could change my cryptic alias to something more readable I would. It just so happens the easiest way to randomly come up with a username was to use the script I use to randomly generate passwords with.

I've spent the past few years SEuO (search engine unoptimizing) my personal online presence including quitting Facebook and started signing up to new services with different aliases so that people can't so easily aggregate what I say. It's kind of embarrassing how paranoid that sounds, but there's the rationale. I don't mind defending my opinions, but I'm loathe to put my friends in a position, as one was, to try to explain my opinion when they might not share it. On the other hand, it's quite liberating being able to say what I want without having to worry about the political costs associated with those comments.

From PG's essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html):

When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.

My tactic online is to say it anyways but make sure nobody knows who said it :)

[kirubakaran]

In future perhaps you can put two or three random words together to generate the username.

For this account, you can ask email [e-mail] to change the username to woollymammoth (available)

[mahmud]

Now I am gonna Olly and it's gonna stick. You could've been "Adam", in quotes, but you blew your one chance.

:-)

Take care man.

[RyanMcGreal]

The Obama administration should look at this issue and provide universal health care like every other industrialized country on earth.

Fixed.

[fdesmet]

It sounds like you haven't actually tried to obtain affordable private medical insurance. I have. A few years ago, I spent almost two years working sans paycheck on a startup and found it easy to satisfy one of my prerequisites, which was an affordable high-deductible medical insurance policy.

The notion that medical insurance has to be expensive is a myth. The notion that medical insurance has to cover every bout of the sniffles is a myth. My policy had a $1000 deductible, which meant I was on the hook for routine medical visits (I didn't have any in two years), but that policy relieved me from worries about financial ruin due to any potential major medical problems. The high-deductible policy that I purchased was less than half the cost of my former employer's COBRA plan. It was well within the realm of ramen profitability. It doesn't take much effort to be an informed consumer in the medical insurance marketplace, but many people (it seems) can't be bothered to try.