Third, health equity cannot only be concerned
with inequality of either health or health care, and
must take into account how resource allocation
and social arrangements link health with other
features of states of affairs. Again, let me illustrate
the concern with a concrete example. Suppose
persons A and B have exactly similar health
predispositions, including a shared proneness to
a particularly painful illness. But A is very rich and
gets his ailment cured or completely suppressed by
some expensive medical treatment, whereas poor B
cannot afford such treatment and suffers badly
from the disease. There is clearly a health inequality
here. Also, if we do not accept the moral
standing of the rich to have privileged treatment, it
is plausible to argue that there is also some
violation of health equity as well. In particular,
the resources used to cure rich A could have been
used instead to give some relief to both, or in the
case of an indivisibility, to give both persons an
equal chance to have a cure through some
probabilistic mechanism. This is not hard to argue.