Does business really oppose universal coverage?

That's the headline the Boston Globe put on the launch of a new business interest group dubbed the Coalition for Affordable Healthcare.

The Wall Street Journal heartily agrees.

By the way don't confuse this group with the Coalition for Affordable Health Coverage, a Washington-based industry group which lobbies on behalf of the uninsured. Although, in industry terms, there is some overlap.

But is that what is really happening? Are businesses against universal coverage?  Not according to the group's Web site. And in this case I don't think they're lying.

The truth is this. When businesses choose to give health care to workers, it's a benefit. When they're forced to, it's a tax. When taxes become burdensome business conditions are hurt.

Health coverage, however, is something all people need. The solution is obvious, to tax people for basic health coverage.

But that's an ideological leap many businessmen have yet to make. So instead their honest concerns about the link between health care costs and results are twisted.

This is the natural result of centering health care reform on business as an obligation, which is what the plan first pushed by former Gov. Mitt Romney did. His hope was that by imposing this tax on businesses, businesses would push back successfully against costs.

But that kind of lobbying, and policy analysis, and deep interaction with the politics of a state, is also a tax. Groups like this cost money to run.

Right now those burdens are being borne by insurers and ideological fellow travelers. The insurers can pass it on, back to businesses paying premiums. There's no such thing as a business tax, right?

The gang at the WSJ wants to hold up the Massachusetts example as a cautionary tale against extending health care coverage to everyone. It is such a tale, but only against doing it through business.

If business' costs are to get into line with those of our global economic competitors, health care must become an individual right, whose costs are imposed on everyone and whose limits are defined by the political system. The howling of business in this case stands as the proof.

Unless you want your bank balance to be the prime determinant of everyone's life span. That, to me, is just asking for revolution, which is always unhealthy for children and other living things.