Back in the 1970s, a group of counterculture comedians called The Firesign Theatre got big laughs whenever one of them proclaimed: "Dogs flew spaceships. The Aztecs invented the vacation. Our forefathers took drugs. And everything you know is wrong."

They were quite serious. (Remember, they were living in the vapor trail of the 1960s.)

And yet, to prove their last statement is undeniably correct, just answer this: Which of the following seems utterly, impossibly wrong: that your great-great-great grandfather experimented with recreational opium? Or that Richard Nixon, the paragon of Republican anticommunism, advocated the brand of socialized medicine we call Single Payer?

Take your time; it's not a trick question.

The truth is, a version of the single payer system, in which the government assures every single citizen health insurance, was a cornerstone of Mr. Nixon's 1960 presidential campaign against John Kennedy. As president, he promoted universal health insurance again in the early 1970s but was thwarted by physicians, hospitals, the insurance industry and John Birchers, who used his belief in national health care to brand him a socialist.

Simple proof that, 30 years ago, The Firesign Theatre may well have been correct - and that everything you know is still wrong, at least when it comes to understanding what will happen to the slowly imploding health care system in Washington state. As multiple special interests push competing pieces of health care legislation through Olympia (and lubricate legislators with hard arguments and soft money), the chances of emerging from this year's session with an efficient, accessible and equitable health care system grows more remote.

Why is this topic suddenly a hot issue again? How did we get into such an unhealthy mess? How will we get out of it? And can a market economy that values individual freedom over collective security create a health care system that simultaneously costs everyone less money yet provides care to all? Remember: Everything you know is wrong.

What we think of as modern health insurance found its start in Dallas, on the cusp of the Great Depression of 1929. Ill and impoverished schoolteachers were irritating the bill collectors at Baylor University Hospital. In a moment of genius, the hospital proposed to guarantee the teachers 21 days of hospitalization in a semiprivate room - all for a prepayment of 50 cents a month.

As the Depression worsened, the revolutionary idea spread to other communities. "It was really more of a hospital financing scheme than an insurance program," says Aaron Katz, a lecturer and health policy scholar at the University of Washington School of Public Health. "It helped the hospitals survive financially when they had to treat all these people who were unemployed." By 1933, the American Hospital Association began promoting the concept, as well as regulating and approving various plans. In that same year, the plan in St. Paul, Minn., adopted a blue cross as its logo, which the AHA adopted officially in 1939.

Here in Washington, the idea's roots seem to have begun in 1933, when the nonprofit Spokane Medical Service Bureau and the Medical Service Corporation were founded. According to Premera Blue Cross, "The original coverage offered was limited to groups of 25 or more, each earning less than $150 per month. The premium was $1 per month and included doctor and hospital services and prescription drug benefits. Keep in mind that in 1933, doctor visits were $2, hospital charges ran $2.75 per day, and a tonsillectomy might have cost $12.50." Today, inflation has added two decimal places to a tonsil job.

By the late 1940s, President Harry Truman, feeling his farmcountry roots, decided it was time for a national health insurance plan. Millions of veterans had left the armed forces and found good work. With plenty of well-paying jobs in the postwar economic trough, organized labor lowered its guard and joined forces with business, its sworn enemy just 10 years earlier, to create the most prosperous partnership in history. The atmosphere across the bargaining table was cooperative, even amicable. From this climate of abundance, labor negotiated the employee health care benefit, which sent America blithely onto the path of what today is our burdensome employerbased health care system.