He was a popular California Republican governor who pushed a politically challenging idea: state-provided single payer health insurance funded with the help of a payroll tax.

Had he succeeded, California Gov. Earl Warren - who later became chief justice of the United States - might have changed the course of the national health care debate and, indeed, the health care system offered to Americans today, said Daniel Mitchell, a UCLA professor of graduate management and public policy who has studied the matter.

Mitchell, who evaluated Warren's landmark health care efforts in a 2002 paper published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, said in an interview this week that the past failure may contain a pointed lesson today for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has also invested considerable political capital in his drive for a comprehensive health insurance plan funded by a payroll tax.

Warren's work on health care reform is largely forgotten by history buffs who remember him as the Republican vice presidential candidate with Thomas Dewey in 1948 and, foremost, in his role as the U.S. Supreme Court's chief justice 1953-69, Mitchell said.

But the Republican governor - who ran on the Democratic and GOP tickets and served 1943-53 - was ahead of the curve in his efforts to create a state-provided health care system for virtually all workers in California; he believed such a reform would especially assist GIs returning from World War II.

Amazingly, as California's governor and legislators debate health care today, many of the same issues were "on the table in the '40s - we've been discussing them for decades," Mitchell said.

Warren's plan was to be financed by a 3 percent payroll tax, and administered by a state-run authority; the proposal was "based on the same principle as government funding of public schools," Mitchell writes.

Schwarzenegger's plan calls for all Californians to have health insurance paid for through a combination of individuals, health care providers and doctors - including a 4 percent payroll tax and a revenue tax of 2 percent on doctors and 4 percent on hospitals.

The Legislature's Democratic leaders oppose mandated health insurance and have endorsed a plan to extend insurance to those in need with a 7.5 percent payroll tax.

In Warren's day, business groups such as the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce - which this week endorsed Schwarzenegger's efforts - and the California Medical Association opposed the Warren payroll tax, saying it would create a deficit.

Warren "neglected to develop and cultivate popular support" for the idea, said Mitchell, in part because he was distracted by "a lot of major items on his plate."

Those included building the then-fledgling California freeway system, which Warren believed should be funded through another revolutionary idea - a gasoline tax.

Sound familiar? Schwarzenegger also is pushing infrastructure and water bonds at the same time as health care - Mitchell said, so "in a way, history repeats itself."

Had Warren succeeded, that kind of a sea change in the way health care was provided to Californians would have led "other states to push to emulate the California example" and possibly even moved the United States "toward a system similar in broad terms, to what exists today in neighboring Canada," Mitchell said.

"Even if there had been no emulation elsewhere, a success by Earl Warren in California would have led to a different contemporary picture," he argued.

The lesson for Schwarzenegger: "There's a certain amount of political resources and capital," Mitchell said. "You only have so much energy as governor."