The following is an excerpt from an article entitled Crocodile Tears for Health Inequality that appeared in a recent BMJ:
I begin to feel that I have witnessed one too many worthy presentations on the nature, extent, and dimensions of health inequality—locally, nationally, and globally. I have myself been guilty of such presentations in the past, but almost no one needs to be told about this any more or to be asked to look at more graphs or tables of figures. Instead, we need finally to find the collective will to do something about it. The documentation and discussion of health inequality has become an industry: a search of Google Scholar reveals 7860 academic references in 0.18 seconds. Like the National Lottery, the scholarly exploration of health inequality seems to result in the paradox of the poor directly subsidising the more affluent.
Similar articles have been published in the U.S. over the last few years, but the need to continue collecting data on the overwhelming health inequities is, IMO, nowhere near as pressing as the need to actually do something about them. This may seem trivially true, save for the apparent fact that the policy initiatives we might need to implement to have a pronounced effect on the fundamental causes of health inequity do not seem to me particularly close to fruition in the U.S. There are many reasons for this, but one may well be it generally requires no real collective act of political will to document health inequalities.
Thoughts?
(h/t SDOH listserv)
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