WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain is set to release 400 pages of medical records, including documents related to his melanoma surgery in August 2000, to a tightly controlled group of reporters on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend.
Mr. McCain said late last week that he had nothing to hide. Campaign officials have nonetheless said that even if nothing in the records suggests a problem with his health, a rush of news media reports focusing on the cancer surgery was not politically helpful and that they wanted to play down the information as much as possible — something that the timing of the release would seem to accomplish.
“There are going to be no surprises,” Mr. McCain, 71, told reporters last Friday aboard his campaign bus on a trip to West Virginia. His doctors, he added, “have told me that everything’s fine.”
Now you're probably thinking that it is about time for McCain to release his medical records to the public for scrutiny. Unfortunately, the McCain campaign has their ideas on what constitutes full disclosure of Johnny Boy's medical records:
On Friday, the campaign will allow a small pool of reporters access to the records from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. Pacific time in a conference room at the Copper Wind Resort in Phoenix, near the Mayo Clinic Scottsdale. The reporters will be allowed to take notes but not remove or photocopy the records. Campaign officials said they were imposing the restrictions to prevent the actual records from wide dissemination.
Around the same time, campaign officials said, they will post medical summaries of each year from 2000 to 2008 on the campaign Web site. The summaries will not include doctors’ notes in the actual records.
The news organizations in the pool, selected by the campaign, include ABC News, The Arizona Republic, The Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NBC News, Reuters, The Washington Post and, possibly, a newsmagazine.
Each organization is allowed two representatives and is expected to file a “pool report” for other reporters detailing the information in the records.
We're talking about a dog and pony show here. Only a few reporters are going to be allowed to look at the McCain medical records, and for only three hours. These reporters will not be allowed to copy the records, but the reporters can take notes. Note this NY Times quote--Campaign officials said they were imposing the restrictions to prevent the actual records from wide dissemination. The McCain campaign doesn't want these records made public! So they are releasing the records in a very limited and controlled fashion, on a Memorial Day weekend, on a Friday, when no one is going to be reading about this. The records are not being photocopied and handed out to reporters, so they can review them, or have doctors review them for any health problems McCain may have. This is not full disclosure, but rather a PR-spin that allows the McCain campaign to claim they've released Johnny Boy's medical records, even though nobody will ever know what is actually in these records since no copies will be released to the public.
So what is John McCain hiding in his medical records? The NY Times reports that McCain had melanoma surgery in August 2000 at the Mayo Clinic. According to the Times:
Mr. McCain, who still has a puffy left cheek and a scar down the back of his neck from his surgery, told reporters that he continued to see an oncologist for regular checkups. The most recent visit was this month.
“I could probably get away with seeing her every six months,” Mr. McCain said, “but just to be on the safe side, I see her every three months.”
The operation was performed at the Mayo Clinic Scottsdale in Arizona mainly to determine whether a melanoma, a potentially fatal skin cancer, had spread from the left temple to a pivotal lymph node in the neck. A final pathology analysis showed that it had not, Mr. McCain’s staff said at the time.
Mr. McCain has said he did not need chemotherapy or radiation.
Mr. McCain and his doctors have released little other information about the surgery.
And what is more interesting here is that the McCain campaign has refused to allow the New York Times into the reporter pool to review the records. According to the New Republic:
The last time McCain released his medical records, one of the reporters who viewed them was the Times' Lawrence Altman. Not only is Altman the dean of science reporters, but he's also an M.D.--i.e., somebody who, even in the short span of three hours, would be able to assess the significance and full meaning of the records. And in an article earlier this year, Altman started raising questions about McCain's present health--and his campaign's curious delay in making the records public.
It sounds like the Times isn't in the pool this time around, which means no Altman. Will any other organizations have physicians as their representatives? ABC and CNN are on the list, so maybe Tim Johnson and/or Sanjay Gupta, both of whom are physicians?
You can bet that McCain is hiding something about his health from the public, even as the campaign is "releasing" the medical records.
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