David Gratzer - 2008 Campaign and Beyond

2008 Campaign and Beyond

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. During the campaign, Giuliani championed interstate health-insurance markets and tax parity for non-employer purchases of health insurance, both positions favored by Gratzer.

Giuliani was criticized when he suggested that his chances of surviving prostate cancer had been higher in the U.S. than in Britain, because of false positives, poor sensitivity of such tests, and the slow-growing nature of prostate cancer. Gratzer responded by defending his "snapshot" method of calculating "survival rates" as the method also used by economist John Goodman, co-founder and president of the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), by economist June O'Neill, and by U.S. Constitutional historian and health policy expert Betsy McCaughey, a former John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Gratzer also cited a September 2007 Lancet Oncology article that found superior cancer outcomes in the United States for 16 cancers when compared to European countries.

After Giuliani withdrew, Gratzer endorsed the McCain health-care proposal.

Gratzer testified several times during the recent health-care reform debates, including before the House Budget and Ways and Means Committees. In a June 2009 U.S. Congressional hearing on the issue of single-payer health care, Gratzer and U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) clashed over Canadian healthcare statistics.

According to a June 29, 2009 front-page article in Canada's National Post, "armed with a stack of statistics about patient wait lists in Canada, and a fusillade of dire warnings about the life-threatening consequences of government-managed care," Gratzer "has emerged as the go-to expert witness for GOP lawmakers hoping to sow doubt in Congress about the wisdom of embracing Mr. Obama's call for a public health insurance option to compete with private insurers."

In July 2009, he appeared on 20/20 to discuss health care.

In November 2009, Encounter Books published a short book of his criticism of the White House plans, How Obama’s Government Takeover of Health Care Will Be a Disaster.

Gratzer continues to comment and debate on health-care issues. He is founding contributor to both FrumForum (formerly NewMajority) and the Canadian version of the Huffington Post. With former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, he debated at the Munk Debates.

More recent work has focused on obesity. In a widely reprinted Los Angeles Times piece, he argued that society was suffering from a McVictim Syndrome with "oo many pundits, public health experts and politicians are working overtime to find scapegoats for America's obesity epidemic." He rejects this: "governments can't micromanage your waistline for you. Even if governments could magically walk you to work, ban food advertising, regulate sugar out of food and suck those fat particles out of the air, in a free society you would still have the power to drive to the nearest restaurant, shake your salt shaker and order a second piece of pie. That's why understanding — and rejecting — the McVictim culture is crucial to obesity reduction policy."

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