Introduces a vision for the future of health equity and explains practical policy measures for how to achieve it.

Health inequity is one of the defining problems of our time. But current efforts to address the problem focus on mitigating the harms of injustice rather than confronting injustice itself. Ultimately, this only makes the problem harder to solve. What the field of health equity needs is an egalitarian politics that directly challenges social inequality. In Equal Care, Seth A. Berkowitz, MD, MPH, offers an innovative vision for the future of health equity by examining the social mechanisms that link injustice to poor health. He also presents practical policies designed to create a system of social relations that ensures equal care for everyone.

As Berkowitz illustrates, the project of social democracy works to improve health by bringing relationships of equality to the sites of human cooperation: in civil society, in political processes, and in economic activities. This book synthesizes three elements necessary for such a project—normative justification, mechanistic knowledge, and technical proficiency—into a practical vision of how to create health equity. Drawing from the fields of medicine, social epidemiology, sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, and more, Berkowitz makes clear that healthy inequity is social failure embodied, and the only true cures are political. This makes Equal Care essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of health equity.

Seth A. Berkowitz, MD, MPH (CHAPEL HILL, NC), is a general internist, practicing primary care physician, and clinician investigator. He is an associate professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.