But I suppose they are the party of big business, not the party of business in general.
Bill Clinton was a once-a-century skilled politician, but if you translated his policies without his extreme personal charisma to today it’s unlikely he would make it through the Dem primaries.
Oh hi. That is me.
Main problems are elsewhere: doctors gatekeeping the market, lack of transparency when it comes to pricing, regulation making it impossible to compete for smaller players etc.
They don't give any shits about free market economics or struggling entrepreneurs. They care about protecting their own money.
And it isn't about big business; that's the Democratic Party. It is about hoarding wealth and gaining more.
It's also well known from leaks that the first Obama administration selected his cabinet using recommendations from Citigroup.
All they'd have to do is cut a few friends (insurers) loose. They'd still even have the power of the contract to reward theoretically productive elements of the new health system in return for kickbacks, and there'd simply be more money sloshing around within government to take advantage of. They could continue to stomp the planet freely, because Americans don't care about anyone but themselves. The upper-middle class post-Obama "left" would evaporate. Give them free state college and they'd start calling Republicans the real left.
Another reminder that the US government spends more per-capita on health care than every country with universal health care, and then the population pays again.
One of the things usually cited to defend this waste of money is the massive excess army of people working in healthcare administration, half of whom are employed to file paperwork and the other half employed to throw it in the trash. Now that they're all soon to be replaced by AIs which will be able to simultaneously file and delete worthless paperwork at inhuman speeds, we can let go of that garbage excuse.
But in a more sane world the Republican Party would simply acknowledge slavery as being a real debt owed, and stop being racist, without changing anything else. Most black people are socially conservative Christians, and it would instantly become another God-Emperor situation. Democrats haven't won whites since Kennedy; they gave them entirely up for supporting basic civil rights for black people (an own-goal for the Republican Party, started as a single-issue antislavery party) and big business. Without guaranteed black support (the only other choice black people have to Democrats is not to vote, which is quickly increasing its share), the Democrats wouldn't be a viable party at any level. Republicans are not sane, they are short-termists like everyone else.
Picking out the Republicans is unfair, though. Democrats lobbied furiously and entirely dishonestly against single-payer healthcare in 2016 and 2020. They even tried to sell single-payer and its supporters as racist.