The Pinocchio Test: Romney and Giuliani got facts wrong on "Hillary care"

[dajoki]

THE FACT CHECKER
By:Michael Dobbs
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/10/hillary_care_and_socialized_me.html#more
Candidate Watch
'Hillary Care' and 'Socialized Medicine'

Republican Debate on Fox News, October 21, 2007:

MITT ROMNEY:

"We solved the problem of health care in our state not by having government take it over, the way Hillary Clinton would with private, free-enterprise approaches...Hillary says the federal government's going to tell you what kind of insurance, and it's all government insurance."

RUDY GIULIANI:

"We only have 17 million people in America who buy their own health insurance. If we have 50 million or 60 million people who bought their own health insurance, the price of health insurance would be cut in more than half."

Republican candidates have been vying among themselves to denounce "Hillary Care" as tantamount to the introduction of "socialized medicine," and a government-run health system, similar to the British National Health system. The Clinton campaign argues that the senator's federal health care plan is very similar to a Massachusetts plan signed into law in April 2006 by then Governor Romney.

So who is right?

The Facts
According to MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber, who advised Romney on his health care reform law and has also advised Clinton, the Massachusetts law has a lot in common with the Clinton plan. Both plans mandate universal health care coverage and subsidize health care for people on low incomes. The main difference is that Clinton's proposal permits people to switch to a Medicare-type plan and increases taxes at higher income levels.

Contrary to claims by Romney and other Republicans, the Clinton plan does not force Americans to accept "government insurance." It offers people a choice. If they are happy with their present health plan, they can keep it. Otherwise, they can switch to the plans offered to members of Congress, or a government-run plan similar to Medicare.

"The only way this will lead to government health care is if Americans prefer government health care," said Gruber.

The Romney camp appears to be backing off the claim that Clinton's plan is tantamount to "all government insurance." According to his spokesman, Kevin Madden, Romney was "alluding to the belief that this is an eventual outcome of Hillary Clinton's plan." Clinton may appear to offer a choice, Madden said, but "the reality of the marketplace is that everyone will end up in government-run coverage over time." He said in an e-mail that employers would lose the incentive to offer private plans to their workers.

Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, argued in Sunday's debate that the way to solve the health care mess is to encourage Americans to take out their own private insurance. He claimed on Sunday that the "price of health insurance would be cut in more than half" if the numbers of people buying their own insurance increased from 17 million people at present to "50 or 60 million people."

The Giuliani campaign was unable to provide factual support for the mayor's assertion. Instead, they pointed to the "basic tenets of free market economics" and a Heritage Foundation study showing that the cost of laser eye surgery fell 47 percent in real terms between 1998 and 2004 as more and more people purchased the procedure.

The Pinocchio Test
The claim that "Hillary care" is tantamount to "socialized medicine" does not stand up to serious examination. The Clinton health care plan has more in common with the Massachusetts plan signed into law by Governor Mitt Romney than the British National Health system. We award three Pinocchios to Romney.


Giuliani, meanwhile, plucked a figure out of thin air when he claimed that the price of health insurance would be cut by more than half if more people bought their own policies. His only basis for the statement was faith in the power of free market economics. Since it is impossible to prove him wrong, we award him only one Pinocchio on this occasion.

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Giuliani's Bogus Diagnosis
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, November 2, 2007; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/01/AR2007110101991.html

Even Rudy Giuliani would acknowledge that he can be prickly. Now, it seems, the tough-talking former mayor is growing estranged from empirical fact.

I'm referring to his presidential campaign's recent radio ad in New Hampshire, in which Giuliani speaks of his personal experience with prostate cancer and then cites an ear-grabbing statistic: "My chances of surviving prostate 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."

Hold it, you mean I'd be nearly twice as likely to die of prostate cancer in Liverpool as in Los Angeles? Twice as likely to succumb in Oxfordshire as in Ohio? Amazing. Also, not remotely true.

As several truth-squading journalists -- notably, The Post's Michael Dobbs-- have pointed out, mortality rates from prostate cancer in Britain and the United States are roughly the same: About 25 men out of 100,000 die of prostate cancer each year in both countries. (That's the standard way of reporting mortality rates, deaths per 100,000 individuals.) I'll get to the math a little later -- that's a promise, not a threat -- but first, I want to try to understand Giuliani's thought process. Giuliani wasn't spoon-fed those dodgy figures by some speechwriter. He plucked his data on prostate cancer from an article in City Journal, a publication of the conservative Manhattan Institute, which has been crusading against the idea of single-payer health-care systems such as the National Health Service in Britain.

<<snip>>

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