The Death Gap: Social Inequity and Health

The U.S. health care system is the most expensive in the world, yet we fall far behind other industrialized nations on measures such as the number of uninsured, infant mortality, and life expectancy. Physician David Ansell, argues that widespread social inequality drives health disparities in life expectancy among minorities and the poor. Join Ansell, whose previous book County covered the history of one of America’s oldest urban public hospitals and whose latest, The Death Gap, explores why these health disparities persist, for a discussion with the University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack about the state of American health care and what can be done to close our disturbing death gap.