Significance We find that global warming has very likely exacerbated global economic inequality, including ∼25% increase in population-weighted between-country inequality over the past half century. This increase results from the impact of warming on annual economic growth, which over the course of decades has accumulated robust and substantial declines in economic output in hotter, poorer countries—and increases in many cooler, wealthier countries—relative to a world without anthropogenic warming. Thus, the global warming caused by ...

OBJECTIVES This study examined the relationship between income inequality and heart failure outcomes. BACKGROUND The income inequality hypothesis postulates that population health is influenced by income distribution within a society, with greater inequality associated with worse outcomes. METHODS This study analyzed heart failure outcomes in 2 large trials conducted in 54 countries. Countries were divided by tertiles of Gini coefficients (where 0% represented absolute income equality and 100% represented absolute income inequality), and heart ...

Social factors, signals, and biases shape the health of our nation. Racism and poverty manifest in unequal social, environmental, and economic conditions, resulting in deep-rooted health disparities that carry over from generation to generation. In Perspectives on Health Equity and Social Determinants of Health, authors call for collective action across sectors to reverse the debilitating and often lethal consequences of health inequity. This edited volume of discussion papers provides recommendations to advance the agenda to promote health ...

In this paper, we discuss methods to allocate national health care funds to purchasers or insurers of health care. For administrative reasons, resources are usually allocated as they always have been—which relates more closely to the existing structure and demand than to need. Resource allocation through capitation is needed to achieve equity in access to health care or health outcome. Capitation should be based on epidemiological or sociodemographic need factors. The author discusses how to select and weight need factors and provides examples ...

The gross inequalities in health that we see within and between countries present a challenge to the world. That there should be a spread of life expectancy of 48 years among countries and 20 years or more within countries is not inevitable. A burgeoning volume of research identifies social factors at the root of much of these inequalities in health. Social determinants are relevant to communicable and non-communicable disease alike. Health status, therefore, should be of concern to policy makers in every sector, not solely those involved in ...

Health disparities (differences in health by socioeconomic groups) are a pressing issue in our society. This article provides an overview of a multilevel approach that seeks to understand the mechanisms underlying health disparities by considering factors at the individual, family, and neighborhood levels. In addition, we describe an approach to connecting these factors to various levels of biological processes (systemic inflammation, cellular processes, and genomic pathways) that drive disease pathophysiology. In the second half of the article, ...

Despite large gains in health over the past few decades, the distribution of health risks worldwide remains extremely and unacceptably uneven. Although the health sector has a crucial role in addressing health inequalities, its eff orts often come into confl ict with powerful global actors in pursuit of other interests such as protection of national security, safeguarding of sovereignty, or economic goals. This is the starting point of The Lancet–University of Oslo Commission on Global Governance for Health. With globalisation, health inequity ...

Background: The common starting point of many studies scrutinizing the factors underlying health inequalities is that material, cultural-behavioural, and psycho-social factors affect the distribution of health systematically through income, education, occupation, wealth or similar indicators of socioeconomic structure. However, little is known regarding if and to what extent these factors can assert systematic influence on the distribution of health of a population independent of the effects channelled through income, education, or wealth. Methods: ...