Thirty-six companies have decided to join forces in a push to extend health insurance to all Americans, The Los Angeles Times reported today.

Similar proposals have come from presidential candidates, Congress and labor groups, but this appears to be the biggest effort by corporate America so far.

Members of the coalition “employ more than 1.7 million workers, and 18 of the companies are among the Fortune 500’s biggest firms,” The Times said.

The leader of the Coalition to Advance Health Care Reform would seem an unusual choice. As chairman and chief executive of Safeway, Steve Burd endured a strike of his union workers on the way to cutting back health care coverage in 2004.

At that time, Mr. Burd was trying to compete with Wal-Mart and its nonunionized, far-less-insured workforce. The results by 2006 were impressive, but he “soon realized that corporate cost-cutting had its limits,” Jonathan Cohn wrote in The New York Times magazine last month:

As long as there were large numbers of uninsured, Burd reasoned, there would be no solution to his company’s — or the country’s — problems with affordable care. And that, he says, is when it finally dawned on him: Maybe this was a problem the company couldn’t solve on its own. If he wanted relief from employee health costs, the government would have to help.

Indeed, Mr. Burd’s corporate partners are in the same boat, seeking universal health care “not so much out of social solidarity as out of financial necessity,” Mr. Cohn said.

As he built the coalition, Mr. Burd quietly advised Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, on the best-known universal health care bill in Congress.

But their proposals diverge when it comes to paying for insurance for the poor (You can read a proposal comparison here). While Mr. Wyden’s plan calls for government subsidies, Mr. Burd’s steers “clear of how to pay for subsidies and what requirements, if any, need to be placed on the nation’s employers,” The Los Angeles Times writes.

The lack of such key details raises the same questions that were raised during President Clinton’s universal health care push during the 1990’s. Mr. Cohn asked Jonathan Oberlander, a health-policy scholar at the University of North Carolina, about what’s changed between now and then.

“This is precisely the political equation the Clintons bet on,” Mr. Oberlander responded. “Sorry to say this may turn out to be another mirage.”