are arguing is: "we who have good insurance coverage want the world's best medical care, when we want it. We don't want to wait in long lines while the poor clog up the system."
The issue of rationing will be discussed at further length later. Conflict theory will provide a sociological perspective from which to view such a distribution of finite medical resources. Structural functionalism, as another sociological perspective, will also be discussed as it relates to the U.S. health care system. Is the lack of adequate health care a public issue, or a private problem? The theories of C. Wright Mills, along with the sociological perspectives of conflict theory and structural functionalism will guide the discussion.
The distribution of power (or money, or influence, or finite resources, etc.) has been persistently, if sometimes sporadically, studied by American social scientists. At the national level, perhaps the most significant of these studies was C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite, published in 1956. In addition, Mills's The Sociological Imagination was concerned with "the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works"--that "'between the personal troubles of milieu' and the 'public issues of social structure.'" (Mills, 1959, p. 8). He notes that this distinction is an essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic works in the social sciences.
In The Sociological Imagination, Mills (1959) uses the examples of war, marriage, and the metropolis (p. 9); he might just as well have added, "health care," in his analysis of personal problems and public issues. Of course Mills was writing from a 1959 perspective, whereas one of today's most contested topics is health care. Today, the nation's third largest industry is in conflict with the needs of an ever-increasing population of the working poor or unemployed--individuals who need more public subsidization of healt...