For all the name-calling, rabble-rousing and witch-hunting in the war of words over health care reform, precious little has been said about why modern America needs so much health care. Much less has been mentioned about the meaning of the term "health care" — which, amid all the shouting, has come to mean medical service.

We're all for it — both as remedy for our aches, pains, palsies and diseases, and as a way of heading off the need for serious treatment: Medical science's ability to detect disease and head it off through medication, operations or both is a marvel of modern times. To the extent that paying health care premiums makes testing and early treatment more affordable, that's great — and everyone should have it; thus our editorial support for the kind of serious reform being advocated by New Mexico Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall and Rep. Ben Ray Luján.

But why so little attention to that 1970s micro-trend, wellness? This notion was briefly in vogue among the Earth Shoe crowd, and a few dedicated hippie types have held to it — but largely it's gone ignored.

Former Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist, himself a heart surgeon, has been raising the flag of wellness — and with good reason even if, as a Republican, he might be suspected of seeking to muddy further the turgid waters of the health care debate.

Frist, seen in the 1990s as presidential timber, serves on the Robert Wood Johnson Commission to Build a Healthier America. He's also been an adviser to something called the Vitality program, an effort to promote healthy behavior — among employees of companies, for example. In one case, a manufacturer discovered that health care cost savings for workers who got serious about their own health amounted to more than $100 a month.

More important than all the doctors, hospitals and health-care policies, it appears, is behavior: diet, exercise, abstaining from cigarettes and drugs and going easy on alcoholic beverages. Doing what's good for you, and not doing what's bad.

According to Frist, the most important behavior to change is "what and how we eat." Obesity, he says is the root cause of chronic disease — and accounts for nearly a tenth of what the country spends on health care. Need he go farther than to note that it's linked to the scourge of diabetes? If so, maybe it's in mentioning that an obese person has 40 percent more medical costs per year than a non-obese one.

So while we're talking reform, he suggests, how about incentives for employer-sponsored wellness programs — and lower co-payments on preventive care? For good measure, Frist — sounding more like The New Mexican's liberal and nutrition-conscious columnist Inez Russell than an anti-government Republican — says we should require school lunch programs to meet nutritional standards, and while we're at it, develop community planning to include places for exercise as well as sources of healthful foods.

"For the first time in history" he says, "we are raising a generation of children who will live sicker and shorter lives than their parents. Where and how we live, learn, work and play have a greater effect on how long and how well we live than added medical services."

So any serious health care proposal "must include a robust component that aggressively 'incentivizes' more healthful lifestyle choices and removes obstacles to such choices."

Ideas like this shouldn't distract our country's health care reformers — but once they've wrested control of Congress from the insurance lobby, if they can, good-health incentives should be tucked into our tax laws.