I’ve found myself defending Rudy Giuliani a lot lately. He’s a far cry from libertarian, but his bread is buttered on the right side: Rudy tends to be morally liberal and fiscally conservative in general. This time, he’s coming under fire for comments he made about ‘universal healthcare’, and before we go any further, let’s clarify the term and recap the policies for audiences on both sides of the pond. In Britain, the National Health Service (NHS) is a government-run, tax-funded healthcare system where its services are ‘free at point of use’. Because it’s funded publicly, and because little (if any) exchange of cash occurs at the point of use, it’s called universal healthcare: everybody gets to benefit from it, even though only some are paying the taxes which pay for it.

In the United States, on the other hand, the system is mostly private and extremely diverse: it’s made up of thousands of separate companies providing healthcare, thousands of separate companies providing health insurance plans, and a smaller tax-funded government system which aims to take care of healthcare for the poor and the elderly (Medicaid and Medicare). Hillary Clinton, who has outlined plans for bringing universal healthcare to America, is running for the White House and is currently popular in the polls. At the same time Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko was released earlier this year, advocating the same thing. So it appears that, like it or not, this is part of the political debate in America now.

Rudy Giuliani, who must fight Clinton head to head on universal healthcare as so much else, has released a TV ad in New Hampshire in which he cites his recovery from prostate cancer as an argument against universal healthcare (which he calls “socialized medicine”):

“I had prostate cancer five, six years ago. My chance of surviving cancer – and thank God I was cured of it – in the United States: 82 percent. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England: only 44 percent under socialized medicine.”

This would certainly be telling information. If universal healthcare is better, as Hillary and Mooreon and others on the Left wish to claim, wouldn’t the NHS recovery rates in the UK be better than the private healthcare recovery rates in the United States? Yet Giuliani’s numbers state the opposite. It’s hard to argue against solid evidence that universal healthcare will not look after the health of the country as good as the current system. Unfortunately, though, Giuliani got the numbers wrong. Salon.com contributor Joe Conason wants to take issue with him on this:

“Giuliani had picked up his numbers from an article in City Journal, a publication of the right-wing Manhattan Institute, and simply repeated them in public without bothering to check their validity. Unfortunately, they were essentially fraudulent figures, extrapolated inaccurately from old data (by a doctor who also advises the Giuliani campaign on healthcare).”

Hmm. Not good. I guess universal healthcare does have a better record on this. Giuliani would have had as much of a chance, or greater, under the NHS in the UK, it seems. Joe?

“[Well, actually, John,]…the survival rate from prostate cancer in England is better than 74 percent and in the United States is better than 98 percent.”

What? You mean Rudy got the numbers wrong but the general idea right? So what was your point, then, Joe? The NHS performed much better than Giuliani said, but not as well as the American system which Joe and his cronies want it to replace! The figures were wrong, but the point of quoting them intact, and the argument within which they were used remains as strong as if the figures had been correct the first time. No wonder these idiots lost the last two elections.

Joe goes on to scrutinise the details of Giuliani’s healthcare plan, a private HMO, which was responsible for helping him recover from prostate cancer. In doing so he singularly fails to get the point Giuliani is making: that the quality of universal healthcare is significantly worse than the existing healthcare system in the US, a fact bourne out by the numbers Joe himself provides.

And his arguments are pathetic. For example, he makes sure to point out that the costs of Giuliani’s prostate care were “…largely underwritten by city taxpayers.” Well of course they were, you jackass; he worked for the city as mayor! His salary, and therefore his private insurance plan, were paid by the City of New York! He then asks if this qualifies as “socialized medicine”. Really, Joe, this is the best you can do? He was an employee, you fool. There’s nothing ‘socialized’ about it.

You see, the problem is that Joe has never lived with “socialized medicine”, so he doesn’t have a fucking clue what it’s like. I have. I’ve experienced both systems, and although I must admit that things are more complicated in the United States and could use some cleaning up (mostly due to frivolous lawsuits and government interference), the quality of the healthcare in America is significantly better than it is in Britain, especially for the treatment of serious conditions, major surgery and that kind of thing. One only needs to have a baby in the UK under the NHS to understand the value of private competition in healthcare and of paying for it by private means.

In any case it appears that Giuliani’s ad remains uncontested: his claim is that he would have less chance of surviving prostate cancer in the UK under universal healthcare than he would in the US under the current system, and that claim is substantiated by the figures we all agree are the correct ones.

Thanks, Joe.