Growing U.S. Disparities in Health Not Inevitable

In the public health field, there is an ongoing debate as to whether improvement in the overall health of the population is linked to increases or decreases in social inequities in health, that is, the inequities between higher-income and lower-income groups or people of different race/ethnicities. In the most comprehensive study to date addressing this debate, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) found that, as overall health improved (as measured by a decline in mortality rates), inequities in health both shrank and widened between 1960 and 2002. The study demonstrates that the recent trend of

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