Excerpt:
Europeans have dedicated saturation media coverage to the debate over reforming the American health care system. Some of the coverage has provided useful insights into the diverging attitudes between Europeans and Americans on the issue of health care.
But the health care debate has also provided rich fodder for European opinion-shapers, ever on the lookout for new reasons to bash America. Even with Barack Obama in the White House, European newspaper headlines suggest that anti-Americanism is as alive and well as ever in Europe, even if some surveys say things are improving.
European press coverage of the American health care debate has tended heavily toward the sensational, and the United States has often been portrayed as a third-world medical wasteland in comparison to the European socialist utopia of health, happiness, and longevity for all. Not surprisingly, European political and media elites have seized on the debate in an effort to reassure weary European taxpayers of the superiority of the European social and economic model.