I don't know if I can ever forgive the New York Times for dropping its Times Select subscription feature and kicking its regular columnists onto its free website. Now I have no excuse for not reading Prof. Paul Krugman's increasingly unhinged column, especially when he addresses health policy. Fortunately, I have unmasked his health care errors a couple of times, here and there.

But he's at it again! Even worse, he's using his column to resurrect a discredited attack that a few bloggers (not cited by Prof. Krugman) launched against a radio ad by GOP Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani - an attack that was stopped in its tracks on October 31.

In the New Hampshire ad, the candidate expresses his good fortune to have been diagnosed with prostate cancer in the U.S., where the chances of survival are "82%" versus "44%" in England. Mr. Giuliani's source is an article that Dr. David Gratzer, my fellow Canadian, published this summer, to which Prof. Krugman alludes, though he does not name the author. Prof. Krugman takes the candidate to task for citing statistics without reference.

But Prof. Krugman is not the first to challenge these figures. In a follow-up note published October 31, Dr. Gratzer responded to the handful of lefty bloggers who attacked his claim. If you follow the thread, you'll see that the real issue is that the U.S.does more prostate screening than the U.K., so more men are diagnosed here than in Old Blighty. (Dr. Gratzer is not the first to spark this dust-up. Back in the spring, Cato's Michael Cannon provoked the ire of the left with the same figures.)

Neither Cannon, Gratzer, nor Giuliani need my help to protect them from this flailing, but since they appear to have left Prof. Krugman alone this fine morning, let me point out that Prof. Krugman, today, claims that the actual English survival rate is 74%, which he suggests is within spitting distance of the U.S. survival rate of 82%.

Utter Rubbish! 74% is the survival rate observed in Englishmen through a 5-year period, whereas Dr. Gratzer's figures are a "snapshot": how many men are diagnosed in a year versus how many die in a year. It is completely inappropriate to compare the two figures.

Nevertheless, if we did know the 5-year survival rate for a comparable panel of American men, it would give us better information than the one-year snapshot. Guess what? Such an analysis was released after Dr. Gratzer's original article, and Dr. Gratzer duly cited it in his October 31 sequel.

Dr. Gratzer notes that U.S. 5-year survival rates in this new study are 99%! Although Dr. Gratzer notes that English data for this study were incomplete, it is fair to say that this compares favorably with the 74% 5-year survival rate in the official English data. (There is a timing difference: the English data are for men diagnosed in 1999, and the U.S. data for those diagnosed in 2000 to 2002.)

So, in his attack on Mr. Giuliani, Prof. Krugman crudely disparages Dr. Gratzer's earlier article while ignoring his more recent one, and compares apples to oranges in prostate cancer survival rates.

It's a disgrace, but it's also an opportunity. Maybe after his New Hampshire ad campaign is done, Mr. Giuliani can run an updated one in New York: "Paul Krugman attacked me for being grateful that my chances of surviving prostate cancer in the United States is 82%. He's right: it's actually 99%!"

That's one campaign ad I'd love to hear!