Yesterday, I was at the Indiana State Fair and I got to see the world’s largest boar.

He weighs more than 1100 pounds and he can’t stand up because his body is too big for his tiny, little legs. And what do you ask is the name of the world’s largest boar? Walkin’ Tall.

Hank, Walkin’ Tall, the world’s largest boar who can’t walk, reminds me a little bit of America’s health care system. Depending on your perspective, he’s either impressively huge, or distressingly huge. So what do you do when you have a pig that’s so big, he can’t walk?

You either kill him, put him on a diet, or keep feeding it; which is more or less what the health care debate boils down to. So, I want to talk in a non-partisan way about the health care debate, but I don’t want to talk about death panels because they’re not in the bill, and the stupid, unsophisticated debate about them has distracted from a really large and significant issue. So here are two things that pretty much everyone conservative or liberal agrees upon: 1) the United States spends way too much of its gross domestic product on health care, and 2) our current health care system is radically unfair.

Whether you have good health care in America is dependent largely on whether you work for a big company because big companies have to provide health benefits, and second, whether you have a pre-existing condition which a lot of times isn’t your fault. Some people argue that we need a sort of large-scale government-run insurance company, the so-called ‘public option,’ which everyone would be able to buy into and poorer people would pay less than richer people; and then, this huge government-run insurer would negotiate lower costs for procedures and also cut down on the number of procedures used. Now, even though the public option would not in any way eliminate private insurers, private insurers still hate the public option because they know that the government-run insurance company will be larger and therefore more able to negotiate lower prices, which will in turn make the public insurance less expensive and will make people less inclined to use private insurance.

Then you have the people who want to put the pigs on a diet, who say that instead of a public option, we can create the sort of non-profit insurance companies that will then have to compete with private insurance; and because they won’t be for profit companies, they’ll be incentivized not to work for the shareholders and the company, but instead to work for the patients they represent. Now of course the downside of the put-the-pig-on-a-diet-plan is that you still end up with tens of millions of people who have no health insurance whatsoever. “And then, there are the people who don’t want a health care system overhaul. They want to keep feeding the pig.

A lot of those people are happy with the current state of their health care, and to be frank I think they probably don’t want to pay for people who make stupid decisions. Here’s the underlying problem: even though a lot of people are screaming, “I don’t want socialism! No socialism!” In America right now, we have a lot of socialism.

We share the cost of schools and roads and the military. We also currently have socialized medicine, we just have an outrageously bloated and inefficient system of socialized medicine because there are hospitals in America where anyone can go and get treatment. That treatment may eventually bankrupt you and it may be of poor quality, but you can get it.

And I would argue that it’s the inefficiency of our socialized medicine that in the end makes health care so much more expensive than it is anywhere else in the world. Is health care a privilege or is it a right? If it’s a privilege, even if it’s a really desirable privilege like indoor plumbing, we need to stop giving health care of any kind to uninsured people who can’t pay for it in advance.

I think the reason we continue to treat people who are uninsured is because we don’t believe that health care is a privilege; we believe that it is a right. And if it is a right like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then it’s a responsibility of a government to protect that right.