SOME YEARS AGO − considerably more than 20 − the legendary Fred Friendly gave me a pocket-size paperback containing the full texts of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Amendments.
Friendly, who died in 1998, had been a pioneering radio producer in the post-war 1940s, then joined CBS News in 1950 to produce radio and television news programs. Among his early landmark achievements, Friendly teamed up with Edward R. Murrow, a correspondent well on his way to legendary status himself, and a select group of scrappy fellow journalists to establish the TV investigative documentary format as a powerful force in public affairs reporting. Their March 9, 1954, broadcast of "See It Now" proved to be the beginning of the end for an earlier American bully and demagogue, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
In 1966, two years after becoming president of CBS News, Friendly left the network in a dispute with corporate management and became a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Friendly continued to inspire and influence an upcoming generation of reporters and producers and, at the same time, created new broadcast and off-air formats − what became known as the Fred Friendly Seminars − for exploring ethical and moral dilemmas.
I can't recall exactly when Fred favored me (and countless others over the years) with a copy of America's founding documents, which he typically handed out to his students. But we periodically crossed paths in the course of my work as a television critic at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York Daily News and during my long service as a juror for the duPont-Columbia Awards, national honors for excellence in broadcast and digital news, administered at the Columbia journalism school.
Fred's little book remains one of my treasures, having outlived a succession of briefcases that served as its home. The number of times I've fished it out to retrieve text or check exact wording − sorry, Google − is beyond calculation.
The book fits comfortably in the palm of my hand and runs just 64 pages. Yet writings about the documents it contains − representing 241 years of debates, discussions and court decisions − fill untold billions of pages housed in libraries and archives, both physical and digital.
What's intriguing − while recognizing and respecting the legal scholarship and robust advocacy that the documents have provoked − is that their plain words sometimes have helped clarify for me dizzying conflicts over current issues.
TAKE HEALTH CARE, the most glaring and immediate example. Right now, Republican leaders in Congress are in high-gear pursuit of their ideological − some would say pathological − obsession to wipe out the seven-year-old provisions of the Affordable Care Act and return health insurance and medical costs in the U.S. to their pre-2010 state of crisis.
Regardless of which political parties, interest groups and individuals seek to change American health care, they must confront the stark truth that only the tiniest handful of Americans could afford to pay on their own for the health care they would need if they got gravely ill. Only a few more could pay retail for treating less serious conditions. For that matter, the vast majority of us couldn’t even afford the diagnostic procedures we’d need to discover what's making us sick and how bad off we are.
Given those financial realities, for Americans who are stricken with illness to get the care they need but cannot afford, it takes a system of private, public or blended health insurance − a system that accepts everyone, charges reasonable premiums, modest deductibles and co-pays and includes participation by all to even out risk and moderate costs.
SEARCHING FOR CLARITY and guidance in the dense political fog of this issue, I grabbed Fred's paperback and turned to page five: the opening passages of the Declaration of Independence. The second paragraph plainly says that we all have been created equal with fundamental human rights that include "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." And it says that keeping these rights available and accessible to everyone is why people create governments.
Then I turned to page 17 and the first lines of the Constitution. It says that "We the People of the United States" are establishing a Constitution to improve how the once-separate colonies of England now can work together as united states of their own new country.
More specifically, it explains that the overall mission of the Constitution is to create a just legal system, to keep the peace inside the country, to prevent forces outside the country from disrupting our nation, to "promote the general welfare" and to keep these and other "blessings of liberty" available to all throughout time.
SO NOW I’M WONDERING how it’s possible for people to make any use of their guaranteed life and liberty if they get sick and don’t have money to pay for the health care they need to get better. I find no words in the founding documents that limit health care to those who can afford it, no words that disqualify children born into poverty or adults trapped in its grasp. The words don't exclude people, whether in rural or urban communities, whose decent jobs have disappeared because of technological change or profit-driven management choices, leaving behind women and men to struggle without employment and without income to buy health insurance to help protect them from the random ravages of illness.
I'm wondering if "the pursuit of Happiness" is simply impossible for people who need care that is unaffordable without insurance and still unaffordable with pseudo-insurance that comes with crippling deductibles, lifetime limits on benefits that run out before treatment has a chance to work and co-pays they can't pay.
I’m wondering if in the absence of health insurance, “the pursuit of Happiness” is a cruel joke to the family of an aging mother whose identity is slowly been stolen by dementia, to a wife and children whose husband and father has been attacked by ALS, to parents of a daughter critically injured in a car accident, to classmates of a teenager caught in an opioid addiction, to loving friends of a man struck down by cancer.
And I'm wondering how any country can claim to "promote the general welfare" if it lacks a system that helps all its people − from the poorest to the wealthiest − deal with the physical, psychological, familial and financial traumas of disease, illness, injury and genetic accident that surely no one would wish on themselves or their relatives, friends, co-workers, neighbors, acquaintances or even strangers.
OVER THE LAST 100-PLUS YEARS, a few presidents from both parties have tackled the challenges of health care and failed or succeeded to varying degrees. Most presidents haven't tried at all.
President Barack Obama's 2010 Affordable Care Act annoyed ideologues who reject the very idea that government programs can or should help the American people, yet without health, the guarantees of the founding documents become empty promises.
The ACA represented significant progress, albeit with fixable imperfections, in protecting the rights of Americans to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the real world. Backsliding on that progress not only would be wrong but also would assault the values enshrined in the Declaration and the Constitution.
The current Republican proposals would fix nothing. They would throw tens of millions of Americans back into the ranks of the uninsured and lure even greater numbers of us with the false security of inadequate coverage.
They would undermine “the general welfare” of our nation and do serious damage to We the People of the United States.
A version of this column originally was published by the St. Louis Jewish Light.