Not to overstate the case, but Sen. Ted Kennedy and Moses had a shared destiny. Like the flawed patriarch who led his people to the Promised Land but never set foot inside it, Mr. Kennedy died last week having led the nation toward universal health-care coverage that he would not live to see.

In light of the passing of this great champion of great causes, it's fitting to revisit this passage from a column that Mr. Kennedy published last month in Newsweek.

"Nothing I'm enduring now can compare to hearing that my children were seriously ill," he wrote.

"In 1973, when I was first fighting in the Senate for universal coverage, we learned that my 12-year-old son Teddy had bone cancer. He had to have his right leg amputated above the knee. Even then, the pathology report showed that some of the cancer cells were very aggressive. There were only a few long-shot options to stop it from spreading further. I decided his best chance for survival was a clinical trial involving massive doses of chemotherapy.

"Every three weeks, at Children's Hospital Boston, he had to lie still for six hours while the fluid dripped into his arm. I remember watching and praying for him, all the while knowing how sick he would be for days afterward.

"During those many hours at the hospital, I came to know other parents whose children had been stricken with the same deadly disease. We all hoped that our child's life would be saved by this experimental treatment. Because we were part of a clinical trial, none of us paid for it.

"Then the trial was declared a success and terminated before some patients had completed their treatments. That meant families had to have insurance to cover the rest or pay for them out of pocket. Our family had the necessary resources as well as excellent insurance coverage. But other heartbroken parents pleaded with the doctors: What chance does my child have if I can only afford half of the prescribed treatments? Or two thirds? I've sold everything. I've mortgaged as much as possible.

"No parent should suffer that torment. Not in this country. Not in the richest country in the world."

Had Mr. Kennedy not been so ill from brain cancer these last months, he would have been on the Senate floor and traveling around the country, pounding home this message, reminding voters of what's really at stake in health-care reform.

He would have urged the nation to cut through the white noise of free-floating rage, to zero in on the people who need help but can't get it, and will never get it until we fix our broken system.

And he would have been working furiously behind the scenes to broker a deal like the many others in his 47-year Senate career that made us a more humanitarian nation.

That he should have been so sick at a time when his voice and skill were needed so much is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportion. But then, the Kennedys have always veered between Camelot, where dreams are born, and Elsinor, where everybody dies.

Meanwhile, health-care reform continues to be distorted and misunderstood, even by those who might benefit from it.

Take this angry message I got from a reader in response to my recent column making fun of the wild charges being thrown around at so-called town hall meetings on health-care reform. After detailing his many ailments, the writer noted that he wouldn't be alive without the private health insurance that covered his treatments, even though it costs him a fortune:

"God knows I would have perished had the Oblunder plan been in place during my time of need," he wrote. "I do not want the government running my health care."

I wrote back that nobody wanted to take away his private insurance. The idea is to add a public option for the 20 million to 40 million uninsured Americans, so that they could have access to the same life-saving care that he is getting. Why wouldn't he want that for them?

He responded that everyone should have access to affordable and portable health care as long as the government was not involved. How such a thing could come about, he didn't say. But he did close with this statement: " I am just tired of paying for social services for everyone. Nobody gave me a goddamn thing."

He's wrong about that. Ted Kennedy, for one, gave him and his fellow Americans almost five decades-worth of improvements to everyday life. The Americans With Disabilities Act, the Family Medical Leave Act, the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act allowing employees to keep health insurance for a time after losing their job, increases in the minimum wage, health insurance for children, higher standards of education through No Child Left Behind -- Mr. Kennedy was an important advocate of all these causes. But he often said that universal health care was closest to his heart.

Flawed as Mr. Kennedy was, from the car crash at Chappaquiddick that killed Mary Jo Kopechne to the years of drinking and carousing, he lived long enough to redeem himself with tireless service to his country, and to become the rock of a family plagued by tragedy and grief.

He died with his greatest hope just out of reach. Sad for him, sadder for us who need his strong, clear, unrepentantly liberal voice as much as ever.