Health equity is different from equal treatment. Giving everyone the same clinic hours does little for people who cannot get off work, lack a car or live far from a hospital. Equity asks what each community needs to reach the same level of health, then shifts resources to close that gap.
The federal government named the problem in 1985, when the Heckler Report documented tens of thousands of excess deaths each year among Black and other minority Americans. The gaps it described have narrowed but not closed. In 2023, life expectancy at birth was 74.0 years for Black Americans and 78.4 years for white Americans, according to the CDC.
Today health equity work focuses on the conditions that shape health before anyone sees a doctor: housing, food, clean air, insurance coverage and wages. It also targets bias inside medicine itself. For Anti-Racism Daily, health equity is a measure of whether a society has dismantled the systems that make some lives shorter than others.