Memo to cost-conscious businessmen: You should be backing efforts to have a universal health-care system as a way to level the economic playing field with competitors abroad and at home.

You doubtless are well aware of the disadvantages of competing with companies in every other major industrialized country where national systems keep the cost of health care from falling directly on employers. For you, this perhaps is more important than the customary argument for universal health care that focuses on the 47 million Americans without adequate health-care coverage.

Another important factor that I learned while doing research for the Institute of Politics at the University of Pittsburgh: the unfairness for conscientious companies that offer employee health insurance of having to compete against rival firms that do not. The pressure this creates to do away with employer-provided health insurance not only affects efforts of U.S. companies to retain skilled employees as Baby Boomers reach 65 years of age but also explains some of the outsourcing that is roiling the economic and social landscape of America.

According to Morton Mintz, a highly regarded journalist whose medical exposes include the Thalidomide and Dalkon Shield scandals of 40 and 20 years ago, businesses would do much better under a publicly financed but privately run health-care system for all -- including free choice of physicians. He says universal coverage would cost employers far less in taxes than they currently pay for insurance and help balance their books in other ways. Research by The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit "working for a high-performing health system," found that in 2005 employer premium contributions for coverage of active employees and their dependents reached $420 billion, more than one-fifth of total U.S. health expenditures.

Here's another plus for employers under the single-payer plan that Mr. Mintz is talking about: Dean Baker of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates employers and employees each would pay a tax of 3.3 percent, as against the 8 percent to 9 percent of income they shell out now.

A New York Times survey concluded: "Health premiums are sapping corporate balance sheets even more than the rising cost of energy." The questions of co-pays and cutbacks in health coverage also increasingly are a cause of labor strikes.

Single-payer would be a Medicare-like system where the government pays all health-care bills with tax dollars. It would save an enormous amount of money by eliminating the need to deal with dozens of private insurance companies, most of which earn considerable profits, and by allowing the government to bargain with drug companies for quantity discounts on prices. Note: The big chunk of money needed to make the plan work would be a restoration of the tax cuts for the extremely wealthy that the Bush administration pushed through Congress in 2001.

Other plans are being offered. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama takes a more cautious approach, leaving private plans in place but offering a Medicare-like plan to compete with them. He would provide subsidies to individuals and to small business owners that offer their workers coverage. He would require that parents get insurance for their children.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain would significantly alter the present system by eliminating the tax deduction for employer-provided insurance. While still having the option of employer-based coverage, every family would receive a direct refundable tax credit -- effectively cash -- of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families to offset the cost of insurance. (Critics say ending the employer deduction likely would erode the present employer-provided system over time, putting the onus on individuals to provide for their own insurance, and also that it doesn't take into account the cost for a family of catastrophic injuries or major surgical costs.)

Now it's understandable why insurance firms, drug companies and some medical groups oppose plans that would diminish or eliminate the profits they enjoy but that keep sending insurance rates up and health-care costs zooming. American now pay an average of $7,206 for health care, more than double the average among major industrialized nations. So why do businesses and industries in general drag their heels on something that would be so beneficial to their bottom lines?

In my interviews with Pittsburgh business leaders, the answer could be summed up in the word "socialism." But none of the proposed plans are like Great Britain's socialized medicine system, under which health-care employees and hospitals are owned by the government. Moreover, as Mr. Mintz points out, corporate America seems happy with Medicare. If Medicare is such a good answer for the elderly and for business, why not support a system that extends it to all?

A single-payer system best fits that goal. But the focus should be on pushing for any system that doesn't leave 47 million Americans without adequate coverage. Corporate America remains the key to helping everyone's bottom line in that essential way.