Introduction

People commenting on the health care scene seem always to bemoan the fact that they cannot understand the chaos which is the worldwide medical industrial complex. Most of the work to date tacitly accepts the prevailing ideology of the medical industrial complex as espoused by its own protagonists and embarks on the futile task of understanding that “system” in terms of its own internal logic. This chapter begins with a series of interrelated questions: what is the basic or underlying logic of advanced capitalism. Health services research, as it is generally practiced, overlooks the political and economic setting within which the medical game is currently played and, consequently, remains preoccupied with issues of relative unimportance. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.