With Republican Scott Brown having won a landslide victory for the Massachusetts US Senate seat previously held by Democrat Edward Kennedy, NFR smells blood on Obamacare. Thankfully, this nightmarishly statist policy is mobilising American voters as never before. Therefore, it is ironic that while Obama’s personal ratings continue to ride high, it is his policies that Americans simply do not want. They will not accept even more government healthcare.

Beyond the government programs of Medicaid, Medicare and S-Chip (which already have a combined budget greater than that of the Pentagon), Americans are not prepared to accept a trillion dollar programme designed by ideologues who want to further stifle what little remains of a market, so that they can then claim ‘market failure’ and make subsequent calls for full blown nationalisation.

While NFR disagrees with the statist politics of most US Republicans as much as it dislikes the Democrats (both camps implicitly accept largely overlapping degrees of Conservative big-government corporatism), when it comes to the global struggle to get the state out of healthcare, Scott Brown’s victory is good news. In bloodying the nose of his opponents, NFR can only hope that Obamacare will fall to dust. If this happens, instead of more government, it will be vital that thinking Americans capture the word ‘reform’ and make it their own. This is the key challenge for the future. Reform in American healthcare must come to be progressively associated with the market not the coercive state.