Thursday, November 01, 2007

Denialists

My friend and fellow Giuliani adviser David Gratzer responds in the City Journal blog to criticism of the mayor's comparison of British and American cancer survival rates. An excerpt:

This week, Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign released a radio ad in which the candidate praised American health care for curing him of prostate cancer and wondered what might have happened to him under the socialized medicine practiced in the United Kingdom, where survival rates for that condition are far lower. In the ad, now running in New Hampshire, Giuliani says: “I had prostate cancer, five, six years ago. My chance of surviving prostate cancer, and thank God I was cured of it, in the United States, 82 percent. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England, only 44 percent under socialized medicine.” He drew those statistics from an article that I wrote for the Summer 2007 issue of City Journal.

The ad has already aroused intense criticism, most of it claiming that survival rates in Britain aren’t nearly so low. ABC News’s Rick Klein, in a blog entry entitled “Rudy’s Fuzzy Healthcare Math,” writes: “To hear Rudy Giuliani describe it in his new radio ad, the British medical system is a scary place. . . . But the data Giuliani cites comes from a single study published eight years ago by a not-for-profit group, and is contradicted by official data from the British government.” Kevin Drum, blogging at CBS News, declares simply: “Giuliani is full of shit.” Ezra Klein of American Prospect agrees on his blog: “It’s—no pun intended—crap. England and America have vritually [sic] the same mortality rates from prostate cancer.”

Let me be very clear about why the Giuliani campaign is correct: the percentage of people diagnosed with prostate cancer who die from it is much higher in Britain than in the United States. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports on both the incidence of prostate cancer in member nations and the number of resultant deaths. According to OECD data published in 2000, 49 Britons per 100,000 were diagnosed with prostate cancer, and 28 per 100,000 died of it. This means that 57 percent of Britons diagnosed with prostate cancer died of it; and, consequently, that just 43 percent survived. Economist John Goodman, in Lives at Risk, arrives at precisely the same conclusion: “In the United States, slightly less than one in five people diagnosed with prostate cancer dies of the disease. In the United Kingdom, 57 percent die.” None of this is surprising: in the UK, only about 40 percent of cancer patients see an oncologist, and historically, the government has been reluctant to fund new (and often better) cancer drugs.

11/01 11:25 AM