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THE GULF between Republicans and Democrats over reform of the US’s dysfunctional healthcare system remains an unbridgeable abyss. Thursday’s seven-hour TV “summit”, organised and chaired by President Obama, simply rehearsed familiar entrenched positions without narrowing that gap. And with a bipartisan deal now not an option, Democrats have little choice but to go it alone or miss the opportunity of a generation to see through their president’s flagship programme.

House Republican leader John Boehner may have insisted the US has the “best health care system in the world” though both parties agreed the system is broken, but the scale of ambition of their irreconcilable plans are simply of different orders of magnitude – Democrats would extend coverage to 30 million of the uninsured, and the Republicans only to some three million.