Coming to the topic from backgrounds in the area of industry and competition and business strategy, Porter (Harvard Business School) and Teisberg (Darden Graduate School of Business at the U. of Virginia) set out to explore why competition in the US health care sector has not led to greater efficiency and improved quality of service. They first came to the basic conclusion that skewed regulatory and private-sector incentives were driving undesirable results in terms of rising costs and later came to believe that the strategies, organizational structures, pricing approaches, and measurement approaches of various actors were distorting competition. Here they expand upon those basic findings (originally presented in the June 2004 Harvard Business Review) by developing the strategic and organizational implications for each of the major actors in the system and illustrating them with examples. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)