Health inequalities and why they matter

Health inequalities are of concern both because studying them may help one learn how to improve health and because health inequalities may be unjust. This paper argues that attending to these reasons why health inequalities may be important undercuts the claims of researchers at the World Health Organization in favor of focusing on individual health variation rather than on social group health differences. Inequalities in individual health are of little interest unless one goes on to study how they are related to other factors.