Best To Chris Dodd

Sen. Dodd has been diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer. My dad had this, and my grandfather too. It's very common and eminently treatable in this day and age, and hopefully Dodd will be able to beat it as quickly and painlessly as possible. He still plans to run for re-election and be back at work after the August recess. Here's part of his letter to supporters:

I want to assure you that I'm feeling fine. As you know, we've been working hard to pass health care legislation and reform our nation's financial system to protect consumers, and that hard work will continue.

After the Senate adjourns at the end of next week, I'll have surgery to remove the cancer. After a week or two of recuperation, I expect to be right back to work.

After all, as a Member of Congress, I have great health insurance. I was able to get screened, seek the opinions of highly skilled doctors, consider all the available options, and choose the treatment that was right for me.

And I know you'll agree that every American deserves the same ability.

We have health care legislation to pass - and an election to win. And I can't thank you enough for your support.

I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Sen. Dodd when he ran for President last year. I found him smart, engaging and focused on the right issues. He's been hammered back home for being the fall guy in the AIG bonus scandal - falsely, I might add - and for this alleged sweetheart deal on his mortgage from Countrywide, which his hometown paper states in two editorials today were not at all sweetheart deals but widely available mortgage terms.

I hope he's back on his feet soon.

Rudy 2008: A More Untrue America

The fallout from Rudy G's demonstrably untrue statement about prostate cancer survival rates continues. Ezra Klein:

You'll notice the shot at the Europeans in his ad. His statistics are, as the maligned Brits would say, bollocks. In America, mortality from prostate cancer is 15.8 per 100,000 males. In Britain, it's 17.8 per 100,000. What America does have is a radically more aggressive screening program, which doesn't seem to lower mortality much, but radically increases our diagnostic rate.

As the Journal of the National Cancer Institute wrote [PDF]: "similarity of mortality rates between the two populations supports the hypothesis that risk of fatal prostate cancer among British men does not differ from that among US white men. More intensive screening procedures, such as prostate-specific antigen testing, in the United States is the most likely explanation for the widening gap in incidence." In other words, we diagnose a lot of cancers that aren't lethal or are slow-moving enough to not require treatment. Saying, from that data, that we've got twice the survival rate is like saying we have a lower death rate from car crashes because we record more near-misses in the statistics.

Joe Conason:

Giuliani was serving as mayor and participating in a city of New York health plan when his doctor informed him that his prostate biopsy had come up positive. The coverage he enjoyed -- which resembles the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan -- permits all city employees, from trash haulers and subway clerks up to the mayor himself, to select from a variety of insurance providers, and it is not much different from the reform proposals adopted by his nemesis Hillary Clinton.

In the spring of 2000, when Giuliani learned that he had cancer and abruptly dropped out of the Senate race against Sen. Clinton, he was enrolled as a member of GHI, one of the two gigantic HMO groups that provide care for most city workers (the other is known as HIP). He underwent surgery and radiation at Mount Sinai Hospital, a prestigious institution that participates in the GHI plan, which means that his costs were largely underwritten by city taxpayers.

So does that qualify as "socialized medicine"?

Eugene Robinson:

I see two possibilities. One is that he believed what he wanted to believe -- that this huge supposed disparity in cancer outcomes fits so neatly into his worldview that it just had to be right. Hmmm, isn't cherry-picked data -- about weapons of mass destruction, not cancer survival rates -- the reason we have nearly 160,000 troops bogged down in Iraq?

The other possibility is that Giuliani didn't really care whether the figures made any sense or not. He invokes the specter of "Hillarycare" -- shorthand for any health-care reform that Hillary Clinton might propose -- almost as often as he reminds audiences of Sept. 11. Here was another weapon to use against his nemesis.

Paul Krugman:

Why isn’t Mr. Giuliani’s behavior here considered not just a case of bad policy analysis but a character issue?
For better or (mostly) for worse, political reporting is dominated by the search for the supposedly revealing incident, in which the candidate says or does something that reveals his true character. And this incident surely seems to fit the bill...

By rights, then, Mr. Giuliani’s false claims about prostate cancer — which he has, by the way, continued to repeat, along with some fresh false claims about breast cancer — should be a major political scandal...

The fact is that the prostate affair is part of a pattern: Mr. Giuliani has a habit of saying things, on issues that range from health care to national security, that are demonstrably untrue. And the American people have a right to know that.

About those breast cancer claims - you can read about them here. It's another case of our aggressive screening processes delivering a result pretty much exactly that of Canada, which has also raised public awareness on early screening.

A New Hampshire health care group is now demanding that the ad be taken down because of its falsehoods. The faulty statistics, from a right-wing journal, were taken from a study by the Commonwealth Fund, and they're disputing the stats.

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.”

This, of course, is par for the course for a candidate who thinks his foreign policy experience as a mayor is greater than the longtime chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

This has reached a pathological point. Rudy Giuliani is unfit for office simply because he'll decide that Russia is the 51st state, or his new wife is Morgan Fairchild, or he has the power to change the White House into a spaceship with his eyes. This is a disease. I may start a fund for his rehabilitation. Hopefully he still has that public health care so he can afford it.

I've Based My Campaign On Lying, I Can't Stop Now

A couple days ago, I looked at Rudy Giuliani's lies in his health care advertising. I wasn't the only one who noticed. The statistics he used were just completely off the mark. And this is not the first instance with Rudy where serial exaggeration has taken place.

When asked about this, the Giuliani campaign basically said, "We're going to keep on lying."

Asked if Mr. Giuliani would continue to repeat the statistic, and if the advertisement would continue to run, [Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for Giuliani] responded by e-mail: “Yes. We will.”

As Steve Benen notes, this is happening because Giuliani knows he can get away with it. Fact-checking on policy is simply no longer something the media primarily concerns themselves with. Sure, they'll follow haircut expenses deep into the weeds, and they'll track whether candidates prefer the Yankees or the Red Sox, but on issues that actually affect people's lives, they will likely do a he said/she said article and move on. And Giuliani has calculated that won't make as much of a dent in the public consciousness as his ad with the faulty statistics. To quote Greg Sargent:

Memo to media: Rudy and his campaign think you’re a bunch of chumps. They have nothing but complete contempt for the truth and for everything that purportedly led you all to become journalists. Maybe it’s time to get serious about what this guy is up to.

This should be seen as a gaffe. The Giuliani campaign blatantly lied about the signature domestic policy issue facing the nation. That should be part of the narrative moving forward.

UPDATE: Hey, I found something else Rudy's lying about: his strength in blue states!

As it turns out, a poll released Monday showed Giuliani losing California to Hillary Clinton by a 55%-39% margin. And as for his home state of New York — it's even worse, with Hillary beating Rudy by an astonishing 64%-30% margin in a poll released on Tuesday.

How do you know Rudy's lying, he's moving his lips, blah blah blah.

Rudy Gets Government-Funded Health Care From Euro Doctors!

This latest radio ad from Rudy Giuliani about health care is a perfect example of the Big Lie, where someone packs so many deliberate fabrications into one 30-second spot that it's almost too difficult to unravel them all. But Ezra Klein does a good job. Basically, Rudy says in the ad that the survival rate for prostate cancer in the US is 82%, and in England, with "socialized medicine," it's 44%. This is not true.

England and America have vritually the same mortality rates from prostate cancer. In England (as of 1997), 28 males of every 100,000 died from prostate cancer. In America, then number was 26. The difference comes in "incidence" -- there are many more diagnoses of prostate cancer in America, as we have an aggressive screening process.

Problem is, most of those cancers simply aren't deadly, or even necessarily damaging. They're slow-moving and benign. It's like saying we have a lower death rate from car crashes because we record more near-misses in the statistics. We may indeed have a slight advantage of prostate treatment, but it's not what Guliani is suggesting it is.

In Giuliani's age group, where screening evens out, the percentages are precisely the same. In addition, most of that screening in later years falls under the Medicare program, which is - boo! - socialized medicine! And indeed, if you actually judge apples to apples, using a metric like years of life lost due to the health care system, the United States is actually pretty terrible, especially considering we spend twice as much on health care as practically every indstrialized nation.



But the most intriguing part of Klein's takedown was this postscript at the end.

Wouldn't it be interesting to find out if the gold-standard care Giuliani got during his prostate cancer came while he was on government-provided health insurance? He was mayor at the time, suggesting his care was coming through the city, which would suggest it was through the state insurance pool, which works very much like FEHBP -- which is what the Democrats are proposing to expand to all Americans, and what Giuliani is calling deadly, socialized medicine.

And more has been added to that story today:

[T]he technique used on Giuliani, prostate brachytherapy--using radioactive seeds--was pioneered in the modern era by a physician in Denmark, and brought to the US by one of his students.

http://caonline.amcancersoc.org/cgi/reprint/50/6/380.pdf

You'd think a guy whose life was saved by brachytherapy would admit, however grudgingly, that European socialized medicine ain't all bad.

Rudy's seeming "plan" is to give people a tax incentive on purchasing health care (which is not at all the same as a subsidy, and people who can't afford health care to begin with aren't taxed at the rate where such an incentive would make any difference). But he wouldn't rely on that same health care system to deal with his own medical issues. To sum up:

So Giuliani's case for the superiority of our "free market" health care system goes something like this: While on health insurance provided by New York state, he was treated, using a surgery developed by Europeans, for prostate cancer, a disease that most commonly afflicts those covered by the federal government's single-payer health care system. Take that, Europe/national health insurance.

The incoherence is just staggering.