Giuliani wants to privatize healthcare, “that’s how you drive prices down,” he says, likening access to medical technology to access to the iPhone (“that new iPod that can do everything.”) He’s convincing in part because he believes what he’s saying and because he can talk a stream of sentences our current president would have trouble reading. His big persuader on the topic is a personalized anti-socialized medicine stat: “I had prostate cancer a few years ago… in the US, you have an 80 percent chance of survival; in Britain 40 percent. Which do you choose?”

Again the Republican candidate misses the point. Rudy’s chances are/were in fact better than 80 percent: he’s rich and has been a government employee and so has amazing health insurance and is routinely seen after by the best doctors in the world. But what are the survival percentages among the millions of Americans without any health insurance at all, who never see the same doctor twice? They’re better off in Britain, aren’t they Rudy?