Keeping it Honest

While I am open for arguments for and against Universal Health Care the least the opponents can do is get their facts straight. Rudy the Warmonger demonstrates he won't avoid a lie to make his point.

The Washington Post notes today that Rudy Giuliani will be running a new radio ad in New Hampshire starting today:

In the radio spot, Giuliani mentions his battle with prostate cancer and notes that his chances of surviving the disease in America were 82 percent, while in England his chances would have been 44 percent.

"You and I should be making the decisions about what kind of health care we get with our doctors, not with a government bureaucrat," Giuliani says in the ad.

Guess what? Giuliani is lying. As you can see from the chart on the right, Britain and the United States have virtually identical mortality rates from prostate cancer. The only reason the U.S. has a higher survival rate is because we diagnose way more prostate cancer than Britain in the first place. In other words, the difference probably isn't that we're any better at prostate cancer surgery than the Brits, but that we aggressively screen for even mild cases of prostate cancer that probably are not worth treating as they are not life threatening.
You can read more about this over at Ezra's. There is also some other interesting information that applies to Universal Healthcare.