Conclusion Understanding patterns and trends in one's industry is critical to successful contract negotiations. Knowing that a majority of anesthesiologists now appear to work under a formal or de facto exclusive arrangement and that only 30 percent of the respondents to the survey expect to remain without a hospital contract for more than the next two years may make a practice invest more energy in determining the best possible deal than in resisting a demand for an exclusive. I would like to thank Ms. Blough, Ms. Scott and Mr. Fugate for having made the results of their survey available for this column. I would also like to thank the respondents, to this and to the multiple surveys that ASA is fielding. If you seem to be spending more and more time completing more and more questionnaires, you are probably a good observer of reality.
Surveys are a chore, a very necessary one.
Data is the name of the game. The 1998 meeting of the Anesthesia Administration Assembly will take place in Denver on May 3-6. Inadvertently, several lines of text were omitted from the printed version. This omission gives us the opportunity to republish in full an explanation of why the undervaluation of anesthesia persists, a topic on which the ASA Washington Office receives numerous communications. Medicare undervalues anesthesia services.