My wife could afford to start a few small businesses over the years only because I have health insurance from my employment, and can get her, and our kids, to the family plan.
If Obamacare did something good to people not on lowest-paid jobs, it is giving at least some options of health care to entrepreneurs who are not yet raking in millions (that is, most of them).
Since we are talking about anecdotes - whenever I mention some success in my business, most friends get bored. Yet if they get to another create-a-crud-form job - this is being celebrated like some kind of achievement. I still hear talks about how small business is celebrated in the USA (i am immigrant), but I do not experience it in practice.
Historically, lots of small businesses are started not by healthy, young, single childless people, but by midcareer people that have savings to invest and professional networks and experience-based insights to build a business around.
So, when those type of people lose opportunity to start businesses, then total business starts drop.
Also, young people starting non-VC backed businesses have often relied on older midcareer relatives supplying financing, networks, and supporting experience, so many of the same things that hurt older people starting businesses (including healthcare costs, which—with common insurance schemes—not only tie you to wage labor but also still require you to maintain capital reserves for co-insurance, which reduces the attractiveness of using savings for speculative, long-payoff, high-risk business investment) also have a similar, if somewhat lesser, negative effect on younger people doing so.
I would have started my own business by now ... heck I'd probably have started and failed several by now if not for one thing. Well three:
1) you cannot afford prescription drugs in America unless you have good health insurance. At least in my state (Alabama), the federal health marketplace offers exactly one option from exactly one provider. It has a ridiculously high deductible and is (no shit) not accepted at nearly all doctor's offices in my town.
2) I cannot afford to lose my access to prescription medication and healthcare, because my wife has diabetes and I survived cancer a few years ago. We're in fine health now, but we DO have medical expenses ... things that should NOT be that expensive (yearly CT scans and insulin are hardly breaking technology), but have been SO inflated in price by a bogus, rigged third-party-payer system that we literally can't afford those things without "insurance".
3) I had kids early in life, and since my adult working career began, it has been an absolute baseline requirement that I be able to get them medical care and otherwise provide for them.
ok ... having kids early was my decision, and I'll accept that this decision limited my universe of personal options. Getting sick. Having a wife who got sick. These were not personal decisions. They are just things that happen to people.
Our system in America is designed to keep me at my desk, working for someone else, doing mostly meaningless work. Why? Because it'd be a complete nightmare for those at the top, if every last one of me out there in the workplace could afford to take a risk that might not work out.
There'd be a helluva lot more competition out there.
America is dying because of this. Not just our economy. But our society. The world would genuinely be a better place with the companies I would have started in it. And that is true for every other stymied inventor/would-be-entrepreneur in america.
There is always a downside to risk, and there is always a risk involved in starting a new Enterprise. But what we have right now is so far out of whack that taking even a minor risk, can straight up kill you or your kids for lack of access to proper medical care.