True values. While ethical decisionmaking and managed care aren't mutually exclusive, executives are struggling to...

Whether they're fulfilling a mission or just trying to avoid bad publicity, health care executives are facing a tough new world of deal- and decisionmaking based on managed care and the often murky area of ethics. Some are trying to solve the dilemma by developing a set of ethical guidelines from which to work. "It's an exercise in self-understanding," says one health care ethicist who's helping to write such guidelines. Ultimately, he says, it comes down to one question: "What are we really about?"