The Democratic platform needs a healthcare plank that does more than promise higher taxes and a bigger bureaucracy; it must persuade people that the Democrats will make them healthier.

In order to do that, the Democrats need to get out of the mindset of identifying healthcare with health insurance.  Insurance, after all, only ameliorates the financial risk of a need for treatment: it does nothing to make that treatment available.  What will make treatment available to the 45 million Americans without health insurance, and what will drive down healthcare prices, is an expansion of the government's existing healthcare institutions.

Criticism of President Bush and the Bush administration can only take the Democratic party so far.  The Republicans were a minority in Congress, as well as in legislatures across the country, from 1954 until 1994, while they criticized Kennedy, they criticized Johnson, they criticized Carter - and there was plenty to criticize.  But they didn't take control until Newt Gingrich and his friends came up with the "Contract with America", a set of positive proposals.  Whether you liked the "CwA" or not, it finally gave people some concrete images of how the Republicans would govern.

It is time for the Democrats to do something that provides voters with that same kind of concreteness.