Income inequality,structural racism,and Canada’s low performance in health equity

Abstract

In 2017, the Commonwealth Fund released a report evaluating 11 countries’ healthcare systems on a variety of domains; one of these domains was health equity. Canada’s score on health equity placed it among the bottom three countries. This article applies a conceptual framework for health equity developed by the World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health to reflect upon and discuss mechanisms that may help to explain Canada’s low score. We discuss the role that two societal-level constructs—income inequality and structural racism—play in shaping population health and health equity. We use publically available data to examine whether income inequality correlates with the Commonwealth Fund report’s equity measures. We also comment on the role that Canada’s history of colonialism may play in its health equity ranking.