On the relevance of the income inequality to expected health expenditures.

Last week, Hubert Biscuit posted a response on Medium questioning the relevance per capita income to national health expenditures.

He believes that a distributionally-adjusted measure is a more relevant way of understanding health spending and that higher US income inequality implies much lower spending.  Several others have also raised similar objections in response to my arguments on US health care over the past year or two.

I have several lines of response to these sorts of concerns.

On a recent Brookings blog post hyping economic inequality as a predictor of well-being

I recently came across a Brookings Institution blog post regarding the relationship between economic inequality and various measures of well-being.

Setting aside the lack of statistical controls and probable confounds, the practical significance implied by their own plots was actually rather trifling.