HEALTH CARE REFORM is in the air again. Just released census data reveals an increase in the number of uninsured women and children. Bill Bradley outlines a health care package to cover the uninsured just as the House passes the Patient’s Bill of Rights. Old hands from the first-term Clinton White House — Mandy Grunwald, Harold Ickes, and Maggie Williams — are finding gainful political employment in, unsurprisingly, Hillary’s Senate campaign.
Americans shouldn’t have long to wait for another lecture series from Hillary the Health Care Expert. One talking point the advertisers, image experts, and political consultants working for Hillary 2000 might advise her never to use again comes from her 1998 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “A child in Shanghai has a better chance of living to the age of five than a child born in New York City.”
Who knew babies in Shanghai were so well off? Apparently, Larry Summers did. The day before Hillary mentioned that depressing finding, then deputy secretary of the Treasury Summers — who at the time regularly lectured foreigners on America’s short-comings — made the exact same point. Summers’s office said the source for the factoid was a New York Times piece from the early ’90s by the paper’s Beijing bureau chief, Nicholas Kristof.
In April 1991, Kristof indeed wrote about China’s remarkable health care revolution: “In Shanghai, 10.9 infants out of 1,000 die before their first birthday, while in New York City infant mortality rate is 13.3 per 1,000 live births.” Kristof quoted one Gail Henderson of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine saying, the Chinese “health care system really is a shining light of the Maoist era that continues to shine to this day.” Yet, Kristof cautioned the reader: “Third World health statistics are uncertain.”
Kristof’s piece, however, did not cite any source for the data. The World Bank was mentioned later in the article, but only in connection with infant mortality rates nationwide in China — which were much higher than in the United States. Calls to the World Bank revealed that they rely on the United Nations for such data. But the U.N.’s Economic and Social Affairs department reported they do not break down infant mortality on a city-by-city basis. They did admit, however, that all such data are based on “national surveys.” That is to say the Chinese Communist party.
So where did the glowing Shanghai report come from? Kristof’s 1994 book, China Wakes, again repeats the finding — only this time infant mortality rates for New York and Shanghai are almost exactly the same. A footnote reveals the source: telephone interviews “with the Shanghai Foreign Affairs Office.” One would think that mortality numbers would be the province of Chinese health authorities, not any foreign affairs office. Clearly the source is, again, the Chinese Communist party. Curiously, another footnote in Kristof’s book cites a 1993 article by none other than Lawrence Summers for this variation: “A Shanghai baby is more likely to become literate than a New York City baby” — a comparison Kristof admits is “risky.”
Anyway, it turns out that Hillary Clinton was probably relying not just on the Chinese Communist party for data, but on Kristof who relies on Summers who relies on Kristof who relies on the Chinese Communist party. Even if we give senatorial candidate Clinton the benefit of the doubt — let’s assume the resource-strapped Communist party could make an accurate survey of Shanghai’s infant mortality and that it had no desire to distort information — the latest data from 1998 (the year Hillary made the comment) show that New York City’s infant mortality rate was only 6.8 per thousand, almost half of what it was when Kristof described the situation in 1991.
Then again, perhaps Hillary learned about the incredible well-being of Shanghai babies from her husband. He used a very similar factoid in stump speeches during his 1992 presidential campaign. A child born in Washington, D.C., then governor Clinton pointed out, “has less chance to be a year old than a child in Shanghai.” The District’s infant mortality rate was at the time outrageously high, earning it titles like “Infant Mortality Capital of America.” Still, judging from these instances, one might conclude that a baby is better off being born in Shanghai than “in many of our cities,” as Clinton told a crowd in Birmingham, Alabama. No doubt Clinton, too, was using Kristof’s data and, indirectly, relying on the Communist party for information about the health of American babies.
Any politician can make a mistake, but Hillary’s latest health care doom-saying isn’t a run-of-the-mill numbers mix-up. She heard an outrageous proposition — that a country with a per capita income of a few hundred dollars could trump New York City’s health care — but did not pause to scrutinize the proposition before giving it new life in her own speech. One can see how the factoid had the ring of truth for her. American health care, she has told us many times, is bad; collectivist tendencies — villages, universal health care systems — are good.
One, of course, hopes New Yorkers will be skeptical about a candidate who relies on information from Beijing to propose how their tax dollars should be spent.
Brian A. Brown is a Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow.
