tly, the advent of the Internet, and legislation and organizations such as the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), have led to new levels of consumerism. People are becoming more demanding, biomedicines are becoming more appropriate with fewer side effects, and employers are being forced by law to provide wider ranges of health care plans. The author reports that the shift in spending is from public to private, and the health care system must become aware of and accommodate the necessity of both.
Individual attempts have been made to determine the effectiveness and importance of both the private and public health care systems. However, findings are inconclusive and inconsistent. Since findings tend to include multiple factors such as economic, emotional, and other issues, it appears that a meta-analysis is needed to focus on the integration of findings regarding the systems outcomes of private and public health care systems.
The purpose of this research study will be to perform a meta-analysis of existing literature regarding private and public health care systems, to determine the systems outcomes of both.
Systems Theory, proposed by von Bertalanffy in the 1940s, attempts to unify science. This system emphasizes that systems interact with environments and continuously evolve with new properties. Systems theory provides a focus on the arrangement of and relations between the parts of a whole rather than reducing the whole to its parts. The organization of the parts determines the system, which is then independent of the concrete elements. Similar concepts and principles underlie different systems and provide a basis for their unification. Systems concepts such as system-environment boundary, hierarchy, goal-directedness, information, input, output, process, and state can be used to study an issue (Heylighen & Joslyn, 1992). For example, systems theory can be used to study access to health care (priva...