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Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with two international journalists covering the health care reform debate in the United States. Guillaume Debre is a Washington-based correspondent for French TV channel TF1. And Chris Cermak reports for the German Press Agency.

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LISA MULLINS: Here in the United States the debate over healthcare reform has become a bit hard to follow. There are multiple bills now winding their way through Congress and individual lawmakers, along with President Obama, are holding town meetings to take the debate directly to the people. Many of those meetings though have turned into shouting matches. Now, phrases such as “socialized medicine” and “death panels” are being bandied about on TV and online. Well, if it’s hard for us to understand what this is all about those who are trying to follow the debate from abroad must be really confused. So we have asked two foreign correspondents who are based here in the US how they have been covering the issue of healthcare here in the United States. Guillaume Debre is a Washington-based correspondent for the French TV channel TF1 and Chris Cermak is also based in Washington. He’s a reporter with the German Press Agency. Guillaume I’d like to start with you. Given how this debate is unfolding what do you cover more, the actual issue of who can afford healthcare in America or the shouting matches?

GUILLAUME DEBRE: Well there’s two stories as you said and the first one that’s of course the most visual and the most hard to understand for our viewers is the shouting match because the core of the issue to give insurance to 47 million Americans is something people don’t understand in France. For them it’s a given that everybody has insurance. The cost of it also is hard for them to comprehend – a trillion dollars over 10 years. So all this is folded into this sort of shouting match that French people have never seen frankly. And we have never seen a democracy at play in my country where it is so tense and so animated.

MULLINS: Is that true that there’s never been any kind of argument like this, that’s so incendiary? You’ve seen nothing like that in France?

DEBRE: Well usually it’s in the street and it’s protestor against cops or you know in riot gears and stuff like that but not in town home meetings like this where it’s directed at congressmen or senators. Our congressman or senator don’t’ go – and they should – talking to people and asking them questions. What do you feel? And they’ve never been faced with that anger, that level of anger, on an issue that complicated.

MULLINS: Well we should say that the president’s press secretary today said that not everything happening in all the town hall meetings are unfolding as they are on television. Whether or not the cameras have much to do with it remains to be seen. And Chris in terms of you are you giving more coverage yourself to the incendiary nature or to the issue?

CHRIS CERMAK: I think in some ways even though we’re a print, we’re a wire service, you’re still giving more coverage to the process, to the debate, that’s going on  simply because it is one of the most complex issues to really write about and to describe. It’s a domestic issue. It’s something that people outside – when it comes to healthcare itself, as Guillaume said, they don’t really understand too well.

MULLINS: What is the part for your readers in Germany – most of them German anyway – what’s the part that you think is hardest to convey?

CERMAK: I think hardest to convey probably is the cost particularly and also why Americans do not want their healthcare necessarily changed. This idea that about 80% of Americans are actually happy. And I think that’s partly because there isn’t much of a comparison that is going on between the US and Europe. If there is a comparison it’s as you said in your opening that it’s about socialized medicine that Europe has. There’s not much of a talk of the good side of coverage in Europe. So Americans look at Europe and say I don’t want my coverage, the quality of coverage, to go down. I’d rather just keep things the way they are.

MULLINS: Does Germany have the same kind of healthcare system as France?

CERMAK: Germany has in a way a similar one, yes. I mean most people are covered. The costs are much lower. It’s a system that functions very well. If anything one problem might be compared to here that doctors get paid a bit less and that’s often where the debate is rather than the people who are actually receiving the coverage. They seem to be generally happy with it.

DEBRE: It’s a bit the same in France. But what’s interesting is people are a bit confused by the insults and the attacks that Barack Obama is taking. Basically it goes from being a socialist, being a communist, turning this country into the Soviet Union to being Adolph Hitler and a neo-Nazi. And for them it’s everything and nothing and they’re totally confused about what those people mean and what they want to say to Barack Obama when they insult him like that. It’s two different figures. It’s communist on one. You know a really leftist. And then on the other it’s fascism which is for French and European on the right spectrum of the political game. So they don’t really understand what it means.

CERMAK: I was going to say… I agree. I think the biggest problem is the extremes that you have here. The fact that often it’s not about so much the issues that are being discussed but these comparisons that Obama is Hitler or something like that. That kind of stuff obviously gets coverage abroad as well because it’s… Especially of course in Germany. If there’s comparisons to Hitler that’s always a very sensitive issue there.

MULLINS: By the way I’m wondering if in Germany and in France you have the same kind of cable TV system as we have here in the United States and whether or not you think that might contribute to some of the images and some of the attention that the shouting matches are getting.

DEBRE: We don’t have the right-wing television and the left-wing television…

MULLINS: In France? Even though you obviously have those parties in France?

DEBRE: Right. But the news cable televisions have sort of this idea that you know they don’t take side and I’m not sure it’s true but they don’t allow that kind rhetoric to be on their air. The biggest challenge for us – I think at least for me – is basically what happened in six months. We covered Obama saying this is the first black president, the first post racial, post partisan president and in no time, over the summer, when nobody was paying attention we have this huge polarization of the political society here in America and nobody – at least I didn’t see it coming. And it’s hard now to explain when people say well six months ago you were telling us that he was you know this guy who was going to gather America and put it together, unify it, and now he’s basically dividing the country. How do you explain it? And I think that’s hard for me.

CERMAK: And I agree on that point. I think it’s very difficult to explain because Obama is also still very popular in Europe and much of the problems here he’s having is on domestic issues, things that people in Europe don’t necessarily understand. So you’re trying to get across why Obama is failing domestically and it means that you have to get into many of these complex issues which otherwise you might not necessarily cover as closely.

MULLINS: Although we should say also – and that was Chris Cermak who writes for the German Press Agency – President Obama still has a relatively high popularity rating here in the United States despite a lot of the controversy about this particular issue of healthcare. I wonder though for both of you is there something, as you watch this unfold, that you think is quintessentially American about the issue of healthcare, about the debate around it, how it’s talked about? And I can’t help but wonder if you will come clean if in private conversations with your editors back home there’s something that you consider maddeningly American about the debate.

DEBRE: Something that French people have a hard time to understand is this sort of anxiety, this weird relationship that Americans have with their government. And for us it’s very different because the state is present in every side of the society.

CERMAK: And I would perhaps add to that also the political process is something that is very unique here and very different particularly the interplay between President Obama and White House and Congress. The fact that you have five committees working on this issue at the same time while Obama has his own ideas which he can’t necessarily get across to the leaders in Congress. That’s very different form most of the more parliamentary-style systems that you have in Europe where really the prime minister, say, is able to get his opinion across. He presents the legislation which is then approved by the parliament. So that political process is also something that is very American and is something that you have to explain in the stories that you write.

MULLINS: That’s all we have time for but thank you both very much. Guillaume Debre, Washington-based correspondent for the French TV channel TF1 and Chris Cermak based in Washington as well. He’s a reporter for the German Press Agency. Thanks a lot for being on the program

CERMAK: Thank you.

DEBRE: Thank you.

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