Reducing Health Inequality

Reducing social inequality in health is a powerful and widely shared public goal, resonating across political ideologies and social divides. Yet pursuing that goal can sometimes come at the expense of other critical objectives—such as improving total population health or prioritizing care for the severely ill. How should decision-makers balance these competing priorities?Reducing Health Inequality: Ethics, Economics and Evidence examines the ethical and economic dilemmas at the heart of health policy and explores what kinds of evidence are needed to make fair decisions. It offers a guide to practical pluralism—the art of navigating fairness trade-offs when people hold different ethical views. Written by a leading health economist who has pioneered methods for analysing and communicating the health inequality impacts of public policy, this book provides essential insights for anyone interested in reducing health inequality—including policymakers and their advisers, as well as postgraduate students, researchers and professionals in medicine, public health, the life sciences, economics, social science, ethics and philosophy. Public policy makers are poorly informed about the impacts of their decisions on large and growing social inequalities in health. If they want to turn the tide—rather than just paying lip service to the goal of reducing health inequalities—they need clearer thinking and better information. This book shows how the information architecture of government can be reshaped to provide a better understanding of the impacts of public policies on health inequality and the trade-offs that can arise with other objectives. The book has three main messages. First, reducing large-scale social inequality in health is a practical policy objective that most people support, whatever their political persuasion. Second, there are sometimes trade-offs with other important policy objectives, such as improving total population health and prioritizing care for the severely ill. Third, the long-term impacts of public decisions on health inequality can and should be routinely calculated, compared and considered in decision-making.