In fact, I demand it!
Giuliani ran a campaign ad talking about his prostate cancer that compared rates of survival between the US and the UK.
As you can guess, this sent the left into a tizzy and the sycophants came out to herald the magic fairy dust of socialized medicine.
Local uber-leftist blogger, Goldy of HorsesAss, posted about TPM’s Greg Sargent yelling at the MSM for parroting Giuliani’s “Lie”. I followed that link to the TPM blog The Horse’s Mouth.
I may have switched the ends of the horse, but the smell was the same. Sargent links to both an Ezra Klein piece and one from an ABC News blogger, Rick Klein, each of which he claims “thoroughly debunk” Giuliani’s numbers.
Both of which smell exactly like the horse.
Ezra Klein uses the following “logic” (if you want to call it that) to “thoroughly debunk” the numbers. If I may paraphrase:
“We have better screening processes, so we find more prostrate cancers than other countries, btu that skews our statistics up and makes us look better than other countries even though were not because the government doesn’t pay for the screenings.”
So once again, America falls into the trap of being too successful at fighting disease. We’re so good at what we do that it isn’t fair to say that we save more lives because some of the cancers we find aren’t yet life threatening.
Yes, read that last sentence again. Ezra has to have a screw loose to believe that finding not yet life threatening cancers is a bad thing.
And you all probably thought I was callous.
The ABC News blog post by Rick Klein doesn’t have any of the fancy graphs that Ezra has, which is strange when you compare budgets. But what it does have is one of the leading proponents of socialized medicine not corresponding with the headline Rick Klein chose to use.
Don McCanne, a senior health policy fellow at Physicians for a National Health Program, conceded that the five-year survival rate for cancer diagnoses is higher in the United States than in many countries that have single-payer systems, though the disparity is not as great as Giuliani claims in his ad.
But he said that any such comparison is flawed, since it fails to take into account the additional investment in cancer education and screening in the United States. Much of the gap would be closed if other countries invested similar sums in catching cancer early.
So now the excuse for Giuliani’s numbers being right is that America’s free market system spends the extra money in education and screening.
I don’t know about you, but if I wanted my cancer found early and removed, I’d rather spend more money. The folks who want to kill people with socialized medicine are always complaining that America spends nearly twice as much as any other country on health care. Personally, I think that if that extra spending means better survival rates, I’m willing to pay it.
Apparently, there are two Kleins who would rather that Americans die at a higher rate and die with more moeny in the bank.
Five will get you ten that they’re both proponents of the Death Tax too.