On July 30, 2007, Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign named Gratzer as one of his five key health care policy advisors, along with: Hoover Institution senior fellow Dan Kessler, Hoover Institution senior fellow Scott Atlas, Pacific Research Institute president and CEO Sally Pipes, and The Moran Company founder and president Donald Moran.[25]
On July 31, 2007, one day after naming his health care advisors, Giuliani, the 2008 Republican presidential front-runner, unveiled his health care plan in Rochester, New Hampshire, attacked the plans of Democratic presidential candidates as socialized medicine that was European and socialist,[26] and?citing incorrect numbers?said his chances of surviving prostate cancer had been 82% in the United States, but would have only been 44% in England under socialized medicine[27] (the actual five-year relative survival rates for localized prostate cancer were comparable in the two countries: 100% in the U.S. and 99% in England).[28] Giuliani repeated his false claims in campaign speeches for three months[29][30][31] before making them in a radio advertisement.[32][33]
After the radio ad began running on October 29, 2007,[34] FactCheck.org,[35] The Washington Post,[36] and PolitiFact.com[37] consulted leading prostate cancer experts and cancer statisticians who found Giuliani's cancer "survival rates" to be false and misleading fabricated nonsense numbers obtained from an opinion article by Gratzer in the Summer 2007 issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal that had said: "Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out... The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2% here, yet 61.7% in France and down to 44.3% in England?a striking variation."[38]
Gratzer responded[39] by defending his "snapshot" method of calculating "survival rates" from cancer mortality and incidence statistics as the method also used by libertarian economist John Goodman, co-founder and president of the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), by Republican free-market economist June O'Neill, and by U.S. Constitutional historian and self-described health policy expert Betsy McCaughey, a former John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Gratzer said his "survival rates" were one minus the "mortality ratios" (not mortality ratios as used in epidemiology) calculated and presented in Goodman's 2004 book Lives at Risk[40] (Gratzer is noted in the book's acknowledgements as one of its four reviewers?from four conservative think tanks co-founded, like Goodman's NCPA, by Antony Fisher)[41] and duplicated in Gratzer's 2006 book The Cure.[42]
Gratzer cited[39] McCaughey's October 2007 NCPA Brief Analysis[43] giving her analysis of a September 2007 O'Neill NBER Working Paper[44] (calculating "survival rates" from cancer mortality and incidence statistics) and McCaughey's analysis of a September 2007 Lancet Oncology article[45] comparing five-year relative survival rate estimates for sixteen types of cancer diagnosed from 2000?2002 in nine European countries,[46] parts of nine other European countries,[47] and parts of the United States.[48] For 14 of 16 types of cancer, a European country had the highest survival rate; for 2 of 16 types of cancer: colorectal cancer[49] and prostate cancer,[50] the U.S. had the highest survival rate.[45] The Lancet Oncology article said: "That we found a 5-year relative survival for prostate cancer as high as 99.3% in the USA suggests that the increase in survival is largely an artefact from the introduction of screening of prostate-specific antigen?although, we cannot establish the effect that this artefact will have on mortality."[45]
The Washington Post[51] and FactCheck.org[52] again consulted leading prostate cancer experts and cancer statisticians who found no merit in Gratzer's response. Peter Albertsen, professor and chief of urology at the University of Connecticut Health Center called calculations such as those by Gratzer, Goodman, O'Neill, and McCaughey "complete nonsense" and a "very dangerous thing to do."[52] Gerard Anderson, professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said: "You would get an F in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins if you did that calculation."[51]
A month later, The New York Times belatedly declared Giuliani and Gratzer's statistics false,[33][53] and Giuliani and Gratzer's false statistics made the worst of 2007 lists in The Times and The Washington Post.[54]
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