Mount, Virginia, she would have been born in Boones Mill (about halfway
between Rocky Mount and Roanoke), which had no hospital.

Patel's interest in health care was developed more conventionally, as an
academic. He has a lifelong belief that health care is a right! The two of us
agree that the health care system has problems and that there is no text that
addresses those problems from a political perspective. This book is an
attempt to fill that gap.

As is typical of any book, this text is not the product of its authors only. We
would like to thank Pauline Woods for her work on the bibliography and
our graduate research assistant Julie Atwater for her invaluable help in
finding journal articles for us and the really boring task of checking cita-
tions. Patel would like to thank the Faculty Leave Committee at Southwest
Missouri State University for the spring 1991 sabbatical that made the
initial research for this project possible. We would also like to thank Mi-
chael Weber, executive editor for social sciences at M.E. Sharpe, for his
insightful judgment in supporting this project, as well as Esther Clark, his
assistant. Thanks are also due to Eileen M. Gaffney, production editor, and
to her staff for the copyediting. Of course, any remaining errors are ours.

Kant Patel
Mark E. Rushefsky

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