Is Barack Obama a new Adolf Hitler? Is it his intention to institute "death panels" to separate those who will be cared for from those who will not? And is the United States becoming "a socialist country like Russia?" And don't these three count as some of the stupidest questions ever asked? ...

    Indeed, they all feed the daily debate over health care reform in the United States. Radio personality Rush Limbaugh conscripted Hitler. The death panels are courtesy of Republican Sarah Palin. And it was an ordinary citizen of Pennsylvania who invited the Russian socialists to the town hall meeting (a big kitchen table gathering) held in her little village.

    As we see, the arguments, and most especially the tone with which they are thumped out, have long exceeded the limits of the reasonable, sometimes reaching the level of physical violence. That's nothing new. In 1994, when she was pleading in public for a similar reform, Hillary Clinton sometimes had to wear a bulletproof vest!

    Probably it is nowhere in the world possible to discuss health care without a few skids? We regularly experience them here ourselves.

    Why?

    First of all, because health care poses a life-or-death question, so that everyone easily gives in to emotion. Furthermore, resistance to change in this domain is of veritable pachydermic mass. Moreover, the pressure groups agitating in the health care field are extremely powerful. Finally, ideology rages, hence this comic fear of "Russian-style socialism."

    But we would be wrong to jeer.

    "American-style capitalism," with which Canadians are threatened every time someone mentions the role of the private sector here, is the mirror image of the Slavic bogeyman! As recently as yesterday, this specter was brandished once again by the Canadian Health Coalition (a powerful pressure group fighting any change) which is starting a campaign among doctors.

    In this respect, whether it succeeds or fails, the American experience will have been instructive for us. It will indeed give the rudiment of an answer to the question: can an aging society that has become mistrustful and dogmatic and that is "worked over" bywell-organized lobbies still move in one direction or another?

    We'll see soon in the United States. And one day we'll see here: our health care system, superior to that of the United States inmany ways, nonetheless still needs to be looked after too.

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    Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher.