Since the beginning of the year, various coalitions—some of them composed of strange political bedfellows like AARP and the Business Roundtable—have emerged to advocate major health care reform.

The latest entrant into the dialogue is a group of 40 corporations that is calling for universal coverage through a market-based system and is encouraging people to take personal responsibility for staying healthy.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, says that the group, which dubs itself the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform, represents a significant change in the way that business is approaching the issue.

When Congress wrestled with a then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s universal coverage plan in 1994, corporations warned that reform would cost too much. Now, Wyden contends, corporate America is saying that the status quo is too expensive. Indeed, the health care bill is consuming much more of the bottom line today than it did 13 years ago.

But I’m not convinced that these political-mélange groups will hold together when Washington gets down to the brass tacks of legislating. It’s one thing to launch an organization whose goal is to build political will to tackle health care reform. It’s another to remain cohesive when bills are cobbled together in potentially heated negotiations on Capitol Hill.

For now, these groups can sign on to legislation with which they don’t entirely agree in the hopes of advancing the debate.

For instance, it doesn’t seem that Safeway CEO Steve Burd, who leads the recently formed business coalition, is sold on the idea of companies getting out of the health care business and paying into an insurance pool from which their workers would buy individual coverage. Yet that’s exactly what a bill written by Wyden does—a piece of legislation that Burd has endorsed.

Washington is a town that thrives on details. Deciding where to move a semicolon or where to place a period in a 700-page bill can mean millions of dollars to a company or hundreds of millions to an industry. As business organizations like to say, the corporate community is not monolithic.

So, before we come close to arriving at a bill that would overhaul the U.S. health care system, individual companies—not to mention labor and other interest groups— likely will break out of disciplined formations and promote the policies that suit their circumstances best.

This is a perfectly legitimate—and potentially volatile—approach. The splintering of these organizations at the end of the health care reform process will produce a more compelling story than their coalescing at the beginning of the debate.