We discuss the conceptual foundations of measuring (in)equity in health and health care. After an overview of the recent developments in the measurement of socioeconomic inequalities and in racial disparities, we show how these partial approaches can be seen as special cases of the more general...

Most politicians and ethical observers are not interested in pure health inequalities, as they want to distinguish between different causes of health differences. Measures of “unfair” inequality – direct unfairness and the fairness gap, but also the popular standardized concentration index...

We compare two approaches to measuring inequity in the health distribution. The first is the concentration index. The second is the calculation of the inequality in an overall measure of individual well-being, capturing both the income and health dimensions. We introduce the concept of...