ABSTRACT
In trying to understand the present composition, nature, and functions of the health sector in the United States, one is hampered by a great scarcity of literature, both in the sociological and the medical care fields, that would explain how the shape and form of the health sector-the tree-is determined by the same economic and political forces shaping the political and economic system of the United States—the forest. In fact, health services literature reveals what C. W. Mills (1), Birnbaum (2), and others (3, 4) have found in other areas of social research: a predominance of empiricism, leading to dominance of experts on trees who neither analyze nor question the forest but accept it as given.
