I think it had to be completely changed from its original format. It's got to be a lot more business friendly. Maybe a mixture of tax write-offs, the government supplementing costs for employers, and malpractice reform.
Are you familiar with Clinton's OTL proposal in detail, or just making assumptions about what it must have been?
Can any health care reform that results in more care for more of the public without bankrupting working wage individuals and families ever appear to be "business friendly?" It is of course necessary for someone to pay for a more comprehensive system. It is possible that with a more comprehensive system, people take better preventative care of themselves thus lowering overall costs, but it seems frankly silly to bet that way--in reality, people are not going to take good care of themselves if they aren't already, and so either Healthcare Reform is a scam, or it costs a lot. If the burden is not put on the rich, then it will fall much too heavily on the working classes who are already marginal.
So first of all, HC costs money, the burden of the cost needs to be put on the rich to be acceptable to the majority, and anything that costs the rich money is automatically called "bad for business."
On the other hand, depending on the details of the proposal, it would be quite possible for such a reform to be very very business friendly in an objective sense while also serving the public well. Consider a straightforward form of Single Payer--Uncle Sam expropriates the entire health insurance industry (AAAH! Business-unfriendly! Think of the investors!) but with compensation (Aaah...how much? and on what time table? with what funds) and using the data from all the various private insurance policies, conferring with the medical profession to determine fair and sustainable rates for procedures, calculates what full coverage available to everyone would cost, and legislates to add that to the annual income tax, so that poor workers pay little or nothing of it, and the rich pay the larger share (BUSINESS UNFRIENDLY!!11!!). Now every citizen is entitled to drop into any medical facility and announce they'd like to be examined and treated. But who wants to be sick? People will only do this when they feel a need, or because they are told come back in four months, or something like that; hospitals and clinics can refuse all but emergency services. A health care professional who does something they are licensed to do documents it (as they would for responsible medical record keeping anyway, or for applying to private insurance) and sends the bill to the Federal payer, which verifying the procedure was legitimate and was done, promptly pays the standard amount for that work.
The upshot is, people have universal and automatic coverage; they may or may not be given the procedures they think they want, but if not it will be because responsible medicine does not deem it necessary. If they do, they get it for free except in the sense they pay their fair share through income taxes. But coverage is decoupled completely from everyone's employment; it does not matter if you are an executive pulling in millions in salary a year or unemployed, your doctors and nurses and therapists get paid the same for the same services. Therefore it is not any long any company's business, big or small, to handle their employees's health policies. Health benefits have nothing to do with one's job any more.
That removes a burden from corporate management even for the biggest businesses. It is no longer a tradeoff between paying more in health benefit costs versus having a sicker workforce.
For the small businessman--and politically speaking, the politicians who scream about a policy or law or program being "Business Unfriendly" are just about always pretending that it is the small businessman who is their concern; whose heart bleeds over General Motors or IBM?--it is a complete boon. On their scale of operations the tax bite is unlikely to hurt them, certainly not more than the cost of private insurance would, but their employees and prospective hires--and customers for that matter--all have their health costs covered without bothering himself. He can focus on business practice, not have to choose between being forced to hire people in desperation due to zero coverage or paying costs big companies with good connections as well as economies of scale can afford he cannot.
The bottom line--while I can agree it is smarter to shape realistic policies for the USA in terms of due attention to the actual needs of business, we can hardly trust that whatever party is screeching that their opponent's policies are "unfriendly to business" is telling the simple truth either. Fact is, it might be a matter of good policy demanding that business pay to play in the USA, or it might be very beneficial to some business sectors while on the whole burdensome to others. But if the latter who are so "unfairly" burdened now have in the past benefited from policies that unfairly burdened say the small business sector while benefiting them, perhaps this is merely rebalancing the scales.
Anyway I admit to having a tin ear for what might be actually business unfriendly, for them having deafened us with a thousand cries of "Wolf!" while they themselves are the wolves.
So--how exactly was the '94 "HillaryCare" proposal unfriendly to business? Was it in fact the simple matter that any means whatsoever of benefiting people who were getting nothing under the existing evolved system would be costly to everyone and business did not want to bear any of the burden? Was the burden unduly high and unduly shifted onto the rich--and if so, did this come close to offsetting the way these same classes had been benefiting from lowered burdens and rising benefits at the expense of the larger public since the Reagan administration began? Was it organized in a silly way that was unnecessarily destructive of industry?
Funny thing though, at the time I recall progressive critics stating that the whole plan was to enshrine HMOs and force everyone to join one, much as modern HCA requires everyone to sign up with some private insurer or other. Both HillaryCare and ObamaCare mainly suffer from seeming to care more about guaranteeing corporate profits that actual healthcare. In which case I might suggest, the only thing "unfriendly" to business about Hillary's scheme might have been that the benefits to private sector owners were not even larger than she was offering. It might have been better for the public not to pass it than to do so.
I don't know, I am not knowledgeable of the details as you implicitly claim to be by describing it as you do, "not business friendly." Perhaps you can share this expertise by spelling out how it so failed, and illustrate what would have been feasible that would be business friendly instead. Would not a properly business friendly program result in higher costs and less benefit for the general public? Or can you show a win-win?
I figure HillaryCare would have been a mixed bag, probably tilted too far in the direction of mollifying and gratifying the investors in the existing badly functioning health system, less beneficial than the same overall tax burden could deliver via simple Single Payer, but better for many people than the regime before, that we were forced to live with until 2010.
My belief with radical programs like providing National Health is that more is more, that when the public gives a populist a mandate like this they should jump on the back of the establishment with all their weight and grab as much as possible, and the more sweeping, drastic and prompt the change the more that politician can count on popular support at the polls next election. But of course pissing off the money people is always dangerous.