ABSTRACT
Business attitudes mostly range from active opposition to passive submission, although sometimes businesses feign support for strategic reasons. According to influential scholars, differences and shifts in the balance of instrumental, institutional, and structural power between business and antibusiness forces explain phases and variations in welfare state development. Though intuitively plausible to many, generalizations about class division have been challenged with evidence and reasoning that capitalist attitudes about progressive legislation vary considerably over time and space, and that businesses sometimes have good economic reasons for supporting such legislation. A contributory cause was division within big business over complex details of the legislation. Many huge corporations backed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, the biggest expansion of the American health care state since Medicare. The majority consensus about the pervasive and enduring business opposition to the welfare state is especially strong on the question of health care.
