I grant you that it's a data point (well, sort of), but what I meant is that I've never heard it being cited by people who know a lot about startups, and they cite visa issues all the time.
Anyway, bringing up health care in this context is the very definition of a red herring. Nothing stops one from being in favor of both sensible health care and sensible immigration.
Your right, it would be great to fix both health care and immigration. But this founders visa plan doesn't do either. It attempts to create a new category of immigration to fix one issue that certain investors have. If you really want to fix immigration, at least start by dissecting the problems with H1-Bs. I do see that the current proposal claims that an easiest route would be to modify the EB-5. But this is really creating a new type of visa for this special purpose.
It attempts [...] to fix one issue that certain investors have.
That seems disingenuous. This isn't about a few rich people's personal convenience. It's about lowering an absurd impediment to the creation of innovation and wealth.
The investors you mention must be really dumb to waste their time on foreign founders, let alone immigration reform, if they could just go and find better startups some other way. They say their bottleneck is the supply of good startups to invest in. Are they lying or incompetent?
If this ever gets in front a Senate committee, hopefully they will have to disclose hard numbers so we can find out. I don't see why they don't go ahead and publish their data right now if they want encourage more support.
Anyway, bringing up health care in this context is the very definition of a red herring. Nothing stops one from being in favor of both sensible health care and sensible immigration.