Searching for a new paradigm in health care delivery

The cartoon character Pogo, uttering his now famous line, "We have met the enemy and it is us," might well have been referring to the dilemmas that we face today in American health care. A major source of our current difficulties in solving these admittedly complex problems lies in our way of thinking about, or conceptualizing, health care and health care delivery. We are caught in an old paradigm that is simply not adequate for dealing with the health care delivery problems of the '90s, not to mention those of the 21st Century.