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This recent volume of the Surgical Clinics of North America (August 1982) was devoted to surgical health care delivery. Although this may not be the sort of topic the readership can easily apply to the clinical care of patients, the authors and the Surgical Clinics are to be commended for bringing to the surgical community and to all health planners an excellent and concise symposium dealing with a complex and increasingly important set of issues.
We are all aware of sporadic reports in both the surgical literature and the lay press dealing with various topics on the delivery of surgical care in the United States. These range from compendia of often conflicting data, from which it is difficult to draw useful conclusions, to highly editorial essays based on little or no data. Now, for the first time in a single, highly readable, and remarkably concise volume, Ira Rutkow (guest editor)