Potentially serious presidential candidate Tommy Thompson (not to be confused with that dude from Die Hard 2) has some interesting points on health care in George Will’s column this week:

In seven years, health care will, [Thompson] says, devour $4 trillion annually, which will be 21 percent of gross domestic product. It is, he argues, irrational to spend just 7 percent on prevention of sickness and 93 percent on treatment.

I’ll be the first to admit it’s pretty effing stupid, but, in a profit-driven health care system, it’s entirely rational.

Any free-market/capitalist system naturally favors increasing profits over, you know, not making money. A systematic emphasis on treatment yields years of continuous profits for health care providers—doctors and hospitals on up to pharmaceuticals—as sick people (and their insurance companies) need to pay big money just to stay healthy. Emphasizing prevention, on the other hand, not only prevents people from getting sick, it prevents them from paying health care companies. Not exactly in-keeping with that profit motive.

The only way to flip emphasis from treatment to prevention is to partially (if not fully) socialize the system, making health coverage a responsibility of the government, where the incentive will be reducing costs rather than boosting profits. Of course, without a profit-motive in place, we then run the risk of stifling the competitive drive for advancement in medicinal technology, a nice perk of the current system.

At the end of the day, that’s a trade-off I doubt Tommy T. will be willing to make, given the plaftorm of the party he’s running to lead. Call me skeptical.