Paul Krugman takes Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani to task for making up numbers about survival rates for prostate cancer in England. Giuliani (who has prostate cancer) has repeatedly contrasted the 82 percent five year survival rate for the United States with a 44 percent rate for England. He then uses this gap in survival rates as an argument against the "socialized health care" advocated by Senator Clinton and other Democrats. Of course none of the Democratic presidential candidates are advocating socialized health care, but I suppose Giuliani can be allowed liberal use of a word that he obviously views as pejorative. More importantly, the 44 percent survival rate is simply an invention of a right-wing think tank. The actual number for England is 74.4 percent, with most of the remaining difference likely being due to early survival bias. (Suppose everyone with cancer at a certain stage lives six years regardless of whether they are in the United States or England. If we test people more frequently in the U.S. than in England, we will find the cancer at an earlier phase on average in the U.S. Therefore it will be more likely that people in the United States will survive for five years after their cancer is detected.) As Krugman points out, the fact that Giuliani is continually repeating a claim that he should know is not true, about the most important domestic issue in the campaign, should be a prominent feature of campaign reporting. It is difficult to see why this is not a more important issue by a factor of about hundred than items like the Edwards' haircut. It will be interesting to see if reporters begin to draw attention to the issue. It will perhaps be even more interesting to see how long Giuliani continues to repeat this lie.
--Dean Baker
