Health Consumers at the Crossways: Which Way to Go?; Consumer Participation: Sinking or Swimming, An Examination of Effective Criteria, or How to Distinguish between the Baby and the Bathwater, [Includes Nine Essential Tips Which Aid and Abet Consumers in their Quest for Effectiveness] (Zita Feron); Blaming the Victims [Excerpted from Prospects for the Future: Regulation of Federal, State, Local Governments and Third-Party Payers]; Consumer Participation: Futile Efforts in a Misguided System (Arthur A. Levin, MPH)

This issue opens and closes with articles about consumer participation in health care delivery and has a notice of a publication addressing the issue of consumers being blamed where the illness could be ascribed to the life styles of those ill persons and using that rationale to cut health budgets or deny care.