Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Matt Miller, author of The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, explains why big business wants to stay at the center of the healthcare debate.

American business is about to miss a historic opportunity. The stars are finally aligning in Washington for major health-care reform to be enacted in the next few months. President Obama's courtship of the American Medical Association on Monday was the start of a charm offensive aimed at keeping every major stakeholder at the negotiating table (in the docs' case, by signaling his openness to malpractice reform).

But the biggest mystery of the debate is the peculiar feature of American health care that Obama isn't tackling, because the interest group affected--big business--hasn't asked. Despite the fact that soaring health costs are strangling business, employers are slated to emerge from reform still stuck at the heart of America's welfare state. Why? Because that's what business says it wants!

....American business is in the grip of a dead idea. America’s unique employer-based health-care system may have made sense 50 years ago, when health care was cheap, U.S. business faced little global competition, and fending off socialism was a Cold War priority. Today, though, despite radically changed circumstances, corporate America remains caught in a time warp in its attitude toward government. Business resolutely resists the idea of government funding a basic minimum health benefit (along the lines of Social Security providing a universal basic retirement benefit) that might supplant its own current funding and administrative role. Inexplicably, business’ message to Uncle Sam seems to be, “Whatever you do, don’t get me off the hook for this mess.”

Read the full story at The Daily Beast.