The Truth About Giuliani's Prostate Cancer Figures
by Juli Mosoff
In late October, 2007, a short clip from a speech Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani has been giving across the country began playing on radio stations in New Hampshire. The radio advertisement concerns health care, one of the central issues of the 2008 Presidential Election, and is one of Giuliani's first attempts to attack his Democrat rivals and prove that his new health care plan would be better for the United States than theirs. Of course, aggressive campaigning through advertisements has become commonplace in political elections since the basis of politics in presidential elections is to make yourself seem more capable as a president than the others. But rarely before has this been done through blatant lies.
In the radio advertisement, Giuliani references the prostate cancer that he was diagnosed with five years ago and says that in the United States, the chance of surviving prostate cancer is 82 percent. He then contrasts this relatively high number with a shocking statistic: In England, the survival rate of prostate cancer is only 44 percent, almost half of what it is in the United States.
The purpose of this advertisement is to promote his plan over his Democrat rivals' plans for universal health care by comparing their ideas to socialized medicine in England, showing that their plans would be detrimental to the United States. And he might have been successful if his argument had any truth to it at all. In fact, according to The New York Times' Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman, this seemingly stunning claim is simply "bogus numbers wrapped in an invalid comparison embedded in a smear."
Giuliani's statistics are based on an article published in City Journal this summer by Dr. David Gratzer, who admits that his statistics came from a "crude" study performed seven years ago by a non-profit organization called the Commonwealth Fund. As stated in The Washington Post, health experts say that the statistics that Gratzer created are completely invalid because he did not track the same population while doing research. Those who died in 2000 of prostate cancer could have been undiagnosed and had the tumor for 15 or 20 years, representing a completely different group of people from those who were diagnosed in 2000 and then died, but he grouped everyone together in determining the mortality rates.
Gratzer also cited Johns Hopkins professor Gerard Anderson’s 2000 study "Multinational Comparisons of Health Systems Data" as a source for his statistical data. According to Anderson, however, "You would get an 'F' in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins if you did that calculation."
The British Office for National Statistics show that the chances of surviving prostate cancer in Britain are actually 74.4 percent, a huge difference from the number that Giuliani is claiming. And although this is still lower than the survival rate in the United States, the two numbers still should not be compared because the difference in numbers has to do with the fact that prostate cancer is often diagnosed much earlier in the United States, increasing the rate of survival. Altogether, the survival rates for prostate cancer are about the same in the United States and in England, and there is no evidence to suggest that people in England get worse health care than we do.
The fact that Giuliani is comparing socialized medicine to the Democrat's plans is another largely exaggerated claim since the Democratic candidates are not advocating anything even close to socialized medicine. In fact, health care plans proposed by Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards all have "more in common with the Massachusetts plan signed into law by Gov. Mitt Romney than the British National Health system," as shown by a fact-check done by The Washington Post. Even so, Giuliani as well as fellow Republican candidate Mitt Romney are still portraying the Democrats as advocates of socialized medicine.
Reporters from The Washington Post asked Giuliani's campaign to name one respected epidemiologist or prostate cancer researcher who would support the statistics that Giuliani is still quoting at speeches across the country as well as in his radio advertisement. The campaign has not yet responded. Paul Krugman believes that this incident reveals much about Giuliani's character, saying that "what we actually have is the front-runner for the Republican nomination apparently basing his health-care views on something he read somewhere, which he believed without double-checking because it confirmed his prejudices."
Giuliani has dismissed these claims of untruth, disregarded official statistical information from Britain, ignored comments made by respected doctors and researchers, and has allowed the radio advertisement to keep misinforming the public.
