Shanghai on the Hudson
BROWN, BRIAN A.
Shanghai on the Hudson Just where did Hillary Clinton get her strangest health care statistic ever? BY BRIAN A. BROWN HEALTH CARE REFORM is in the air again. Just released census data reveals an...
...Apparently, Larry Summers did...
...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...
...Who knew babies in Shanghai were so well off...
...Just released census data reveals an increase in the number of uninsured women and children...
...comings—made the exact same point...
...They did admit, however, that all such data are based on "national surveys...
...One can see how the factoid had the ring of truth for her...
...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...
...American health care, she has told us many times, is bad...
...The day before Hillary mentioned that depressing finding, then deputy secretary of the Treasury Sum-mers—who at the time regularly lectured foreigners on America's shortBrian A. Brown is a Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow...
...Any politician can make a mistake, but Hillary's latest health care doom-saying isn't a run-of-the-mill numbers mix-up...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Bill Bradley outlines a health care package to cover the uninsured just as the House passes the Patients' Bill of Rights...
...Americans shouldn't have long to wait for another lecture series from Hillary the Health Care Expert...
...Then again, perhaps Hillary learned about the incredible well-being of Shanghai babies from her husband...
...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...
...Kristof's piece, however, did not cite any source for the data...
...collectivist tendencies—villages, universal health care systems—are good...
...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...
...The District's infant mortality rate was at the time outrageously high, earning it titles like "Infant Mortality Capital of America...
...But the U.N.'s Economic and Social Affairs department reported they do not break down infant mortality on a city-by-city basis...
...That is to say the Chinese Communist party...
...Calls to the World Bank revealed that they rely on the United Nations for such data...
...Yet, Kristof cautioned the reader: "Third World health statistics are uncertain...
...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...
...So where did the glowing Shanghai report come from...
...No doubt Clinton, too, was using Kristof's data and, indirectly, relying on the Communist party for information about the health of American babies...
...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...
...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...
...He used a very similar factoid in stump speeches during his 1992 presidential campaign...
...Old hands from the first-term Clinton White House—Mandy Grun-wald, Harold Ickes, and Maggie Williams —are finding gainful political employment in, unsurprisingly, Hillary's Senate campaign...
...A footnote reveals the source: telephone interviews "with the Shanghai Foreign Affairs Office...
...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...
...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...
...Clearly the source is, again, the Chinese Communist party...
...One would think that mortality numbers would be the province of Chinese health authorities, not any foreign affairs office...
Vol. 5 • October 1999 • No. 5
