The World University Rankings: The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, by David A. Ansell
Clare Bambra commends a polemic that shines a light on the fatal flaws in US healthcare policy
In the US, the poor die earlier, black Americans die earlier and poor urban black Americans die earliest of all. In this thoughtful and compelling book, David Ansell draws on almost four decades as a hospital doctor in Chicago in addressing these striking inequalities in health and laying bare the underside of the American dream.
The Death Gap shows the scale of the human cost of income inequality in the US. In Chicago, people living in Washington Park will die 14 years earlier, on average, than those in nearby Hyde Park. Ansell convincingly argues that these vast inequalities in life and death are related not to behaviour or biology but to “structural violence” within the US’ political, economic and healthcare systems.