ABSTRACT
Health care is not the first American industry for which producers had to reinvent their way of doing business in order to survive. Indeed, it may be among the last to respond creatively to the economic upheavals that mark the new millennium. Dramatic changes in the marketplace have forced almost every other sector of the economy to restructure its operations over the past two decades. Today’s leading airlines, banks, accounting firms, manufacturers, information processors, news and entertainment conglomerates, insurers, retailers, and energy distributors bear little resemblance to the companies that dominated their respective industries in the 1980s and 1990s. Many businesses changed their names to reflect major reorganization and reorientation. Others kept their well-established corporate identities but shifted to very different business models, value propositions, distribution chains, and customer relations.
