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Running Head: Changes in Healthcare




Changes in Healthcare from Different Perspectives
Robert Hall
Kaplan University





SS144-01AU
Professor Darcy Mikal
May 18, 2009

There are three dominant sociological perspectives in US society. Those perspectives are conflict perspective, functionalist perspective, and symbolic interactionists perspective. The conflict perspective argues that the structure of society and the nature of social relationships are the direct result of past and present conflicts. The functionalist perspective argues that society is a system. The functionalist also tries to identify the structural characters and the functions and dysfunctions of institutions and further attempts to distinguish between manifest functions and latent functions. Functionalist believe that most members of a society share core beliefs and values. Symbolic interactionists will argue that society is possible because humans communicate with symbols and that people react to other people according to the meaning that has been imparted on the symbol (Kendall, 2007). This paper will examine changes in healthcare from the three dominant sociological perspectives.
Changes in healthcare from a conflictionist point of view can be described as opposing forces for or against the changes. There are some who desire changes to the present healthcare system and there are those who do not wish to see any changes or cannot agree on exactly what about healthcare should be changed. There will always be conflict among those who own the means of goods and production and those who struggle to get what they need. I believe that this theory most applies to changes in health care because conflict usually happens when there is unequal distribution of scarce resources, in this case healthcare. One may not think that healthcare is a scarce resource, but when you look...