Everyone assumes that health-care costs in America are rising too rapidly.

“On a per-capita basis, health-care spending increased by a factor of six between 1965 and 2005, after adjusting for inflation,” say Jason D. Fodeman and Robert A. Book, co-authors of a Heritage Foundation study entitled “Bending the Curve: What Really Drives Health Care Spending” (February 17, 2010).

To say the job market has been slow to recover is a vast understatement. Even though the economy grew for the entire second half of last year — 2.2 percent in the third quarter and 5.9 percent in the fourth quarter — employers have continued to cut jobs and have been reluctant to hire.

The landscape for financing early-stage companies continues to evolve, as does the rest of our economic system. As venture-capital (VC) funds have grown in size over the past decade from the significant influx of money from institutional investors, so has their appetite and need to deploy greater amounts of capital. This sounds like a good thing at first for those of us wanting to raise money for startups.