By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent

WASHINGTON, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Republican presidential front-runner Rudy Giuliani acknowledged on Friday his cancer statistics were outdated but said his point remained the same -- beware of British health care.

Giuliani, who has suffered prostate cancer, has taken criticism from British and U.S. health officials for saying in a radio ad this week the U.S. survival rate for the disease was 82 percent while the survival rate under Britain's "socialized medicine" was 44 percent.

Health officials in both countries say the most recent statistics show five-year survival rates for prostate cancer are 99 percent in the United States and 74 percent under Britain's National Health Service.

Giuliani told reporters he was using statistics from 2000 and said "those statistics have changed slightly today" -- but he did not back away from the broader comparison.

"Even if you want to quibble about statistics, you find me the person who leaves the United States and goes to England for prostate cancer treatment, and I would like to meet that person," he said.

The debate about overhauling the U.S. health-care system is a top issue in the campaign for the November 2008 presidential election.

Many Democratic candidates like Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York have proposed universal health-care coverage for Americans through a mixture of private and public plans. It would not be government-run health care, but Republicans often portray it as a similar big-government fix.

"If we ever got to Hillarycare in this country, Canadians will have nowhere to go for health care," Giuliani said. Canada has a government-funded universal health-care system.

British Health Secretary Alan Johnson said on Thursday Giuliani's figures were wrong and complained about his attacks on Britain's National Health Service.

"The British NHS should not become a political football in American presidential politics," Johnson told The Times newspaper in London.

Cancer survival rate statistics depend on the number of cancers that are detected and when they are reported, and therefore may not necessarily reflect how well a health-care system performs at preventing cancer deaths overall.

The Times said roughly the same proportion of men -- 25 out of 100,000 -- died of prostate cancer in the United States and Britain each year.

The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports research on health systems, reported on Thursday that Americans spent double what people in other industrialized countries did on health care, but had more trouble seeing doctors, were the victims of more errors and went without treatment more often.

Its annual survey comparing the U.S. health-care system to those of countries with national health plans finds the United States consistently last in most categories. (To read more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters "Tales from the Trail: 2008" online at http://blogs.reuters.com/trail08/)

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