Introduction

Over the past eight years, a series of conferences held at Cornell University Medical College have focused attention on certain problems causing serious pain on the U.S. health care scene. The format of these conferences has been straightforward. A small group of distinguished individuals who have spent their professional lives working on the topic under examination have written provocative papers articulating the issues, their thoughts on what caused the problem, its magnitude, and potential ways to mute or solve it. Those papers have then been circulated to a small but diverse group of equally knowledgeable and committed folk from a panoply of disciplines. Both speaker and participants have then come together at Cornell for a vigorous two-day give-and-take. This has resulted in a short book on the subject that generally contains recommendations for action to address the problem more forcibly.