In 2004, John Edwards was just another Democratic presidential candidate offering just another incremental plan to help make health insurance more affordable. It was a perfectly laudable plan -- one that would have made life better for millions of Americans struggling with the cost of medical care. And for that, surely, he deserved plenty of credit. Still, it wasn't as ambitious a scheme as the ones several of his rivals had put forth. Indeed, it would still have left some 10 to 20 million people -- up to half the uninsured population -- without health coverage...

Now Edwards is running for president. Only, this time, he's promising to be a different sort of candidate--one who stands apart from his competitors by taking bolder, more unconventional policy stands designed specifically to push the boundaries of debate...

On Sunday, he began yet another effort to set himself apart -- this time by becoming the first major Democratic presidential candidate to embrace the idea of universal health insurance and offer a plan for getting there. As he explained in a telephone interview yesterday, this decision reflects both a worsening of the nation's health care problems and his own maturation as a candidate...

Edwards's method of achieving universal coverage is to establish what wonks call an "individual mandate" -- a model for reform that has recently become trendy among health care economists on the center-left. (Yes, I just used the words "trendy" and "economists" in the same sentence.) Since getting a big push from the Washington-based New America Foundation a few years ago, individual mandate schemes have found advocates in former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (who passed such a plan for his state) and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (who has proposed such a plan for his)...

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