11.01.07 5:00 AM CDT
• Politics
• Jamie Malanowski
Rudy Giuliani has been working to shore up his conservative bona fides, and apparently the best way he can figure out how to do that is to lie. Giuliani is airing a commercial in New Hampshire that is an attack on "socialized medicine." Talking about his bout with prostate cancer a few years ago, Giuliani expresses relief that he was cared for in the U.S., where the survival rate of that disease is 82 percent, rather than Britain, home of socialized medicine, where the survival rate is 44 percent.According to an article in The New York Times, Britain’s Office for National Statistics says the survival rate in Britain is actually 74.4 percent. Giuliani’s campaign says the 44-percent figure is from an article by Dr. David Gratzer that appeared in an academic publication called City Journal. But in an interview with the Times, Gratzer distanced himself from the figure, saying he got it from a nonprofit group called the Commonwealth Fund, but that the figure was seven years old and "crude." Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Commonwealth Fund says Gratzer misused its data, and calculated his figure from inappropriate data.
Faced with a figure that is now considered old, crude and completely made-up, the spokesman for the Giuliani campaign said that they could continue to run the ad.
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