Giuliani's Health Care Lies Come Back to Haunt Him

This post, written by Amanda Terkel, originally appeared on Think Progress

New Hampshire for Health Care, which "represents more than 60,000 residents who consider health care a top priority in the 2008 election," has called on Giuliani to pull down his misleading ad on prostate cancer statistics. In the ad, Giuliani claims that his "chance of surviving prostate cancer" was 82 percent in the United States, and just 44 percent "under socialized medicine" in England.

Giuliani's campaign confirmed that it took the statistics from a summer 2007 article entitled "The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care." The piece by David Gratzer appeared in the right-wing quarterly magazine City Journal, an arm of the conservative Manhattan Institute.

Gratzer told reporters that "he based his figures on a study by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit group that researches health care policy." But according to the Concord Monitor today, the Commonwealth Fund disputes Giuliani and Gratzer's use of its figures:

But the Commonwealth Fund said the figures didn't come from its reports. They can't accurately be calculated from the seven-year-old report Gratzer references, said Dr. Stephen Schoenbaum, executive vice president for programs at the Commonwealth Fund.

"The figures that they're working on (are) not correctly derived," he said. "They're also old numbers. The numbers are possibly changing."

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