While a welfare economics foundation for the measurement of income inequality and the
comparison of income distributions has long been provided (Kolm, 1969; Atkinson, 1970;
Lambert, 2001; Dutta, 2002), such a foundation has so far been lacking for the proposed
measures of health inequality. Stecklov and Bommier (2002) have explored how the Atkinson
and Bourguignon (1982) approach to measuring multi-dimensional inequality (e.g. in income
and mortality) could be used to provide a welfare economics foundation for health inequality
measurement and arrived at a negative conclusion. They restricted attention, however,
to a specific notion of a just or equitable distribution of health, namely equality of access
(see p. 502) and their negative conclusions are a consequence of this notion. The commonly
used measures of health inequality are based on a different notion of equity, namely
equality of health.2 Fleurbaey (2005a) has justified the use of the concentration curve for
health by interpreting it as a component in the decomposition of the Lorenz curve for welfare.