Shifting dollars, saving lives: What might happen to mortality rates, and socio-economic inequalities in m

ScienceDirect - Social Science & Medicine : Shifting dollars, saving lives: What might happen to mortality rates, and socio-economic inequalities in mortality rates, if income was redistributed?: "Personal or household income predicts mortality risk, with each additional dollar of income conferring a slightly smaller decrease in the mortality risk. Regardless of whether levels of income inequality in a society impact on mortality rates over and above this individual-level association (i.e., the ‘income inequality hypothesis’), the current consensus is that narrowing income distributions will probably improve overall health status and reduce socio-economic inequalities in health. Our objective was to quantify this impact in a national population using 1.3 million 25–59-year-old respondents to the New Zealand 1996 census followed-up for mortality over 3 years.

We modelled 10–40% shifts of everyone's income to the mean income (equivalent to 10–40% reductions in the Gini coefficient). The strength of the income–mortality association was modelled using rate ratios from Poisson regression of mortality on the logarithm of equivalised household income, adjusted for confounders of age, marital status, education, car access, and neighbourhood socio-economic deprivation."