<P> In more recent times, the term was brought up again by Republicans in the 2008 U.S. presidential election . In July 2007, one month after the release of Michael Moore's film Sicko, Rudy Giuliani, the front - runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, attacked the health care plans of Democratic presidential candidates as socialized medicine that was European and socialist, Giuliani claimed that he had a better chance of surviving prostate cancer in the US than he would have had in England and went on to repeat the claim in campaign speeches for three months before making them in a radio advertisement . After the radio ad began running, the use of the statistic was widely criticized by FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com, by The Washington Post, and others who consulted leading cancer experts and found that Giuliani's cancer survival statistics to be false, misleading or "flat wrong," the numbers having been reported to have been obtained from an opinion article by Giuliani health care advisor David Gratzer, a Canadian psychiatrist in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal where Gratzer was a senior fellow . The Times reported that the British Health Secretary pleaded with Giuliani to stop using the NHS as a political football in American presidential politics . The article reported that not only the figures were five years out of date and wrong but also that US health experts disputed both the accuracy of Giuliani's figures and questioned whether it was fair to make a direct comparison . The St. Petersburg Times said that Giuliani's tactic of "injecting a little fear" exploited cancer, which was "apparently not beneath a survivor with presidential aspirations ." Giuliani's repetition of the error even after it had been pointed out to him earned him more criticism and was awarded four "Pinnochios" by the Washington Post for recidivism . </P> <P> Health care professionals have tended to avoid the term because of its pejorative nature, but if they use it, they do not include publicly funded private medical schemes such as Medicaid . Opponents of state involvement in health care tend to use the looser definition . </P> <P> The term is widely used by the American media and pressure groups . Some have even stretched use of the term to cover any regulation of health care, publicly financed or not . The term is often used to criticize publicly provided health care outside the US, but rarely to describe similar health care programs there, such as the Veterans Administration clinics and hospitals, military health care, or the single payer programs such as Medicaid and Medicare . Many conservatives use the term to evoke negative sentiment toward health care reform that would involve increasing government involvement in the US health care system . </P> <P> Medical staff, academics and most professionals in the field and international bodies such as the World Health Organization tend to avoid use of the term . Outside the US, the terms most commonly used are universal health care or public health care . According to health economist Uwe Reinhardt, "strictly speaking, the term' socialized medicine' should be reserved for health systems in which the government operates the production of health care and provides its financing ." Still others say the term has no meaning at all . </P>

The u.s. health care system is one example of the model called socialized medicine