The health care situation in the United States today has attracted an increasing amount of attention by both the public and private sectors, and the situation has been labeled a crisis by many, including the Congress of the United States, The elements of the problem include costs which are rising much faster than other goods and services, inadequately distributed personnel and facilities, lack of a system to provide health care for the poor and rural areas, and a vastly fragmented system in areas of finance, insurance, and delivery. One legislative response to these problems was the Comprehensive Health Planning Program set up by the Comprehensive Health Planning and Public Health Service Amendments of 1966, This was a program designed to use participants from the federal, state, and local areas and from public and voluntary interest groups in order to improve health care through planning. In order to improve on the present arrangement health planning agencies were organized on an areawide or regional basis, in Texas the Comprehensive Health Planning program has been tied to the Council of Government idea for problem solving on a regional basis. The puppose of this study is to examine the development and outcome of the health planning program through a comparative case-study approach.