Uber CEO: Obamacare 'crucial' to his company's success

This weekend, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick appeared at a dinner in New York and, in a few words, fatally undercut the premise of the Republican Party’s economic philosophy. Kalanick told reporters that Obamacare had been a crucial element in his firm’s success. “It’s huge," he said, according to BuzzFeed. “The democratization of those types of benefits allow people to have more flexible ways to make a living. They don’t have to be working for The Man.”

The destructive power of this blunt statement works in two ways. The first, of course, is that it rebuts the Republican indictment of Obamacare, opposition to which is a matter of holy writ within the party. Of all the grounds for Republican hatred of Obamacare, the most deeply held is the belief that it amounts to onerous regulation that holds back capitalistic dynamism. That belief is not only foundational on the right, but nebulous enough that, even as conservative predictions about Obamacare’s cost and functionality obviously fail, the deeper suspicion that it is invisibly rotting away the foundations of capitalism can linger without any real evidence.

Advocates of health-care reform always insisted that the law would enable entrepreneurship rather than inhibit it. By eliminating the need for workers to secure insurance through employer-based coverage, they are free to switch into more productive work or to start up their own firm and obtain individual insurance. In 2010, Nancy Pelosi explained that the law would enable people to pursue whatever work best suited their talents. “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or, eh, a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance,” she said, “or that people could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk but not [be] job-locked because a child has asthma or someone in the family is bipolar.”

Conservatives subjected this quote — often just the truncated first half of it — to endless mockery. But Pelosi was completely correct about this. Indeed, as BuzzFeed also reported last month, Obamacare has played a major role in enabling the sharing economy, which relies on the kind of flexible labor force that is hard to generate without a functional individual insurance market.