The inverse care law is the principle that the availability of good medical or social care tends to vary inversely with the need of the population served.[1] Proposed by Julian Tudor Hart in 1971, the term has since been widely adopted.[2] It is considered a landmark publication in the history of The Lancet.[3] The name is a pun on inverse-square law, a term and concept from physics.
The law states that:
"The availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need for it in the population served. This ... operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, and less so where such exposure is reduced."[4]
Hart later paraphrased his argument: "To the extent that health care becomes a commodity it becomes distributed just like champagne. That is rich people get lots of it. Poor people don’t get any of it."[2]
The Inverse Care Law is a key issue in debates about the provision of health care and health inequality.[5] As Frank Dobson put it when he was United Kingdom Secretary of State for Health: "Inequality in health is the worst inequality of all. There is no more serious inequality than knowing that you'll die sooner because you're badly off."[6]
^Van De Pas, Remco; Widdowson, Marc-Alain; Ravinetto, Raffaella; N Srinivas, Prashanth; Ochoa, Theresa J.; Fofana, Thierno Oumar; Van Damme, Wim (2 January 2022). "COVID-19 vaccine equity: a health systems and policy perspective". Expert Review of Vaccines. 21 (1): 25–36. doi:10.1080/14760584.2022.2004125. ISSN 1476-0584. PMC 8631691. PMID 34758678.
^ abSaul, Peter (27 February 2021). "How much has really changed 50 years on from seminal article on health inequality?". Nation.Cymru. Retrieved 6 April 2022.
^The Lancet (27 February 2021). "50 years of the inverse care law". The Lancet. 397 (10276): 767. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00505-5. ISSN 0140-6736. PMID 33640043.
^Tudor Hart, J. (1971). "The Inverse Care Law". The Lancet. 297 (7696): 405–412. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(71)92410-X. PMID 4100731.
^Watt, Graham (December 2018). "The inverse care law revisited: a continuing blot on the record of the National Health Service". The British Journal of General Practice. 68 (677): 562–563. doi:10.3399/bjgp18X699893. ISSN 0960-1643. PMC 6255247. PMID 30498141.
^"GOVT TAKES ACTION TO REDUCE HEALTH INEQUALITIES". Local Government Chronicle. 12 August 1997. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
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