With the release of Sen. Hillary Clinton's bold, smart health care plan this week, all three Democratic frontrunners for president have now laid out comprehensive plans that set forth an American path to universal coverage to build on what works and reform a broken status quo. All these plans closely track the architecture for universal health coverage long advocated by the Progressive Policy Institute and the DLC.

All three plans stress health care cost containment, and a strong shift toward incentives for quality measurement, preventive medicine, and chronic disease management. All three have employers continuing to offer coverage, while giving individuals the means to purchase their own health insurance through broad-based purchasing pools. All three offer subsidies to people who cannot afford health care premiums, and also build on existing public programs like Medicaid and SCHIP. All three allow for choice in health care plans, eschewing one-size-fits-all, European and Canadian single-payer approaches. All three aim at truly universal coverage, while carefully explaining how such coverage will be paid for. And all three, to borrow a phrase from David Kendall's assessment of the Clinton plan at ideasprimary.org, craft a distinctly American approach to universal health coverage that reflects our country's particular values and needs.

The most notable difference in these plans is that Clinton and Edwards embrace an "individual mandate" for health care coverage, to ensure universality, while Obama argues for ensuring the affordability of health insurance before making it mandatory. Clinton's plan, by limiting mandates for employer coverage or contributions to larger enterprises, appears to do the best job of avoiding a disruptive impact on small businesses.

But these differences pale in comparison to the vast gulf that seems to be opening up in the two parties' approach to health care. President Bush continues to advocate an erosion of existing public programs on budgetary grounds, while offering nothing positive other than a variety of shopworn conservative policy gimmicks that really add up to an attack on collective purchasing of health insurance and even on the basic idea of spreading health care risks through insurance. With one exception, the Republican presidential candidate field echoes the atavistic Bush vision of a health care system in which individuals are left on their own to buy medical services in expensive and unregulated markets, with or without access to insurance. And the one exception, Mitt Romney, appears to be trying to distance himself from his own state of Massachusetts' universal health care initiative, which resembles the Clinton, Edwards, and Obama plans much more than those of any Republican.

With the public increasingly demanding action on health care in response to ever-rising premiums and steady erosions in coverage, it's clear Democrats, and only Democrats, are rising to the challenge. And we're happy they are meeting this challenge in such a responsible and progressive manner.