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The Unspoken Health Effects of the Republican Tax Bill

Barbara Wolfe, a professor of population-health sciences at the University of Wisconsin, explained to me that this is what economists call an income-inequality hypothesis: Your health is influenced not only by your own level of income, but by the level of inequality where you live. Sociologists have described a similar socioeconomic-inequality hypothesis: As socioeconomic disparities grow, overall health metrics decline.