“I think that what I want to do is to look at the Republican ideas that are out there, and I want to be very specific, how do you guys want to lower costs, how do [you] guys intend to reform the insurance markets so people with pre-existing conditions for example can get health care…and if we can [go] step-by-step through a series of these issues and arrive at some agreements, then procedurally there’s no reason why we can’t do it a lot faster than the process took last year”.

In truth, US libertarians at places like the CATO Institute,  the Independent Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have invested huge amounts of time, energy and resources over recent years in developing and honing free market solutions to correct the state failures of American healthcare.

What makes Obama’s statement so interesting is not just that it is an admission that Obamacare One has effectively died, but perhaps to save his and his administration’s reputation, the White House appears to be casting around for viable and practical reforms rooted in the real world and not the quasi-Marxian crack pottery we saw during this administration’s first year in office.

This is all good news in as far as there is now a chance (albeit a very slim one) that the term ‘health reform’ might just become associated with the ideas of a freer market. As I have said many times before, in America the word reform has to be rescued from meaning more of the top-down statism beloved by the political class and its friends in the big anti-competitive corporates. Today, there might just be a chance that Obama is starting to understand this. Only, time will tell.