Poorer people in the UK have shorter lives and are more likely to live with disability is the headline from the Marmot review report, Fair Society, Healthy Lives. The report puts a number on the gap: "the average difference in disabilityfree life expectancy is 17 years." Although the past 10 years have seen a significant rise in spending on healthcare and in general prosperity levels, these inequalities, set out clearly in the Black report of 1980, persist and have deepened.
While the diagnosis may be clear and largely undisputed, the cure is another matter. At a time when the healthcare system, along with broader social welfare policy, is under some financial pressure, this may not be a message governments are prepared to embrace. A guarded welcome from the King's Fund notes that "cash invested in initiatives to tackle health inequalities doesn’t produce instant returns," encouraging the government to stick with the programme. Professor David Hunter, writing in the BMJ, observes "eerie echoes " with the timing of the Black report, which, although commissioned by a Labour government, was issued into the hands of a Conservative one, remarking also that "there are few votes in health inequalities."
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