Impeding Earl Warren: California's health insurance plan that wasn't and what might have been.

It is widely believed that the turning point for U.S. health insurance came in 1949 when Congress failed to adopt President Harry Truman's proposal for a national system. The possibility that a system of state-level health plans might have emerged before Truman's plan has received little attention. Yet several attempts to enact such a plan were made in California by Governor Earl Warren in the mid-1940s. Had Warren succeeded, the California example might have been emulated by other states and the United States might have evolved a system similar to Canada's provincial programs.