The This American Life episode dealing with the rise of the insurance business features one of the best uses of historical knowledge that I’ve observed from a major media outlet.

Unlike many articles about green technology, which are of the history either will or will not repeat itself variety, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson’s account of how our insurance system came to be just explains what happens.

Using the work of Miami of Ohio historian Melissa Thomasson, they show how the employer-funded health care system became entrenched in four easy — and totally contingent — steps. By showing how accidents of history and the responses of academic and corporate actors formed the system, it makes it easier to imagine changing it.

Our system doesn’t exist because it’s the right system, it exists because that’s just what happened.

First, medicines got decent (particularly antibiotics). Second, Baylor University Hospital officials came up with a payment plan, basically, for hospital care. The new business model worked. Then, the Great Depression hit and hospitals everywhere needed to find ways to reduce consumers’ costs while still making some money. Selling workers en masse was successful. Third, World War II price controls and a tight labor market meant that many employers offered enticements in the form of perks like good healthcare. Fourth, an unnamed bureaucratic panel at the IRS held that healthcare payments made by companies were tax-free. Boom! Suddenly, the Federal government is subsidizing all healthcare with the big, slow corporations of the Not Quite Golden Age reaping the benefits.

“You start from 9 percent of the population in 1940 to 63 percent in 1953,” Thomasson says. “Everybody starts getting in on it. It just grows by gangbusters. By the 1960s, 70 percent [of the population] is covered by some kind of private, voluntary health insurance plan.”

And that is how the system was born in 170 words or so.

What’s so great about this reporting, though, is that Blumberg and Davidson don’t try to convince you that history has some arrow or that it’s a cycle bound to repeat. They merely point out how things have changed — with the implicit message that they could change again.

People are biased to the present. The world they live in is The World. And that’s exactly why historical narratives can be so compelling: they break this moment’s stranglehold on the future.